A Community Rating plugin – Serendipity

I recently met with a friend and Serendipity user, Lewe. Since we both are die-hard movie freaks and often rate our movies, we thought about a mean to ease up our rating and IMDB integration scheme.

First we used the cool Custom Fields feature of the entryproperties plugin to insert our Rating numbers and an IMDB link. But then I took a different approach, and put all of that functionality into a plugin called Community Rating.

The result is a versatile rating plugin, which cannot only rate movies but also amazon titles or anything other you can think of. It's smarty template driven, so that you can differently style each rating type. It can convert your rating numbers into rating images.

And the actually coolest feature is, that it can share your ratings based on the ID (like an IMDB movie ID) and export your rating as a XML file over the web. This file can be read by the plugin on any other blog, and embed your own ratings on that page. With the owner of that blog having the full ability to style and change the display of your rating any way he likes!

So now, I embed my own ratings on my movies - and in case Lewe has also seen that movie, his rating will be shown below mine. Ain't that cool?

The plugin has a good documentation delivered in a README file, and is available in CVS and also via Spartacus. Have a try!

UPDATE: - Look at Lewe's blog and for more examples of this plugins' use