Thanks for the reply Elliot.
Have a look at this page:
http://slashcomment.com/movie-review-compendium/
While on the page, note the sidebar on the right called, “Latest Review Roundup”. It’s a small subset of the full list above.
If there was a simple way to get the post_ID in the editing phase I could easily use that.
Later I plan to automate — fully — the creation of both of the above areas but, for now, I’m nowhere near that level of coding expertise to make that happen.
My genesis for this idea was a plugin called Xavin’s Review Ratings. You use a shortcode to just make graphical stars appear wherever you want. For a site like ours, that’s useful. However, as the first page above grew in size we ran into an issue. Their shortcode created the images one star at a time so every line created five calls to draw those stars. The page took 30-50 seconds to render. I then created a much more efficient shortcode that links to images that are already pre-built with five stars (thus a 3-star review would call a single image that has 5 stars with 3 gold and two blank). The difference is the page now loads in a few seconds.
However, I then compared notes with our Editor and we realized between us that we were finding mistakes between instances of the references to each movie. The entry for a movie is this:
[stars rating=5 set=tiny] <a href="http://slashcomment.com/entertainment/12-years-a-slave/" title="by Rich Heimlich 10/25/13">12 Years a Slave</a>
We just paste that into a text widget for the sidebar and the Page for the Compendium page.
Is there a better way? I’m new to WP (switched from Blogger less than a year ago) and PHP coding so I won’t be insulted that I’m doing this all wrong. hehe
