Migrating over from Woo

1. If you have enabled the WooCommerce integration in the Site Reviews settings, then you can add hide="title" to the [site_reviews] and [site_reviews_form] shortcodes in the WooCommerce settings (on the Addons page of the settings).
2. You can either export your reviews to a CSV file on the Site Reviews tools page and edit the CSV column headers to match the table headers in the wp_comments table, or follow the directions in this snippet: https://pastebin.com/04dWK2VD.
3. Site Reviews provides a “Import Product Reviews” tool which will import existing WooCommerce Product reviews into Site Reviews. However, it will not import review comments or replies. You would need to do that manually after importing.
4. The CSS and JS is loaded globally. The gzipped size of the javascript file on the front end is ~10KB. The gzipped size of the CSS file on the front end is ~ 4KB.

Thank you for your helpful answer Gemini.

I’ve been playing around with the plugin and can appreciate a lot of the thought that went into it, how well it performs speed-wise and how much it can help improve the feedback and social proof of the shop.

One question I had relates to point 3 above. I noticed the response to a review becomes a new column for that review making it difficult to in the future revert back to Woocommerce reviews that follow the wp comments format. I’ve had bad experiences with other review plugins in the past so the open-source emphasis of this plugin is a big selling point for me.

Is there any plans of providing a way to export the Resposes to reviews as their own stand-alone entries in the database? Or maybe syncing the Site Review responses to the Woocommerce Reviews section similar to what Disqus does with comments? This would make it easier to revert back to Woo if necessary. For the site I want to use this plugin on, having to pass over 400 responses to each review manually and then reversing that (or more) in the future for any reason otherwise losing all the thoughtful reviews I’ve written over the years would be a bit of a challenge.

WooCommerce uses the WordPress comments table to store reviews, and WordPress comments can have multiple threaded replies.

Site Reviews does not use the the comments table, and reviews only support a single response. It’s been a long time since the first version so I don’t remember all the reasons why I opted not to use the comments table, but performance reasons were definitely part of the decision.

At some point, I will release an addon which will support threaded review comments, but the reason the import tool does not import replies is because of the additional complexity of joining top-level reviews with the first child response given by the admin of the site. This is not as simple as it sounds as a WooCommerce comment review might have multiple replies, by multiple users of a site, and it’s not always straight forward which of those replies should be used as the primary response.

I will look again into what it would take to support importing responses from WooCommerce reviews, but I can’t promise anything at the moment.

As far as exporting responses as their own child comments, this should be pretty simple to do. I’ll provide another snippet for that.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by Gemini Labs.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I see what you mean about the complexities involved in the threaded review responses, it’s good to know there might be an addon that focuses on this.

I’m currently doing a staging setup to test the plugin and it’s working pretty well. One thing I noticed was the Ajax spinning wheel took ages to load the paginated reviews page, but this might just be the staging environment from Kinsta.

I noticed it also only important 100 reviews each time I clicked the Import button but this may be by design. I manage to import them all by repeatedly clicking the import button until I got all 700 reviews.

One thing I’m wondering if there’s also a code snippet/hook for the ability to reposition the review form to the top of the Reviews tab section in the Woocommerce single product page rather than someone having to scroll past all the reviews to leave their own review. Is this possible? I know my WP Discuz has this ability for comments.

Also is it possible to disable the terms toggle from appearing in the form “This review is based on my own experience and is my genuine opinion.”?

As far as exporting responses as their own child comments, this should be pretty simple to do. I’ll provide another snippet for that.

Actually, this isn’t a simple thing to do either. Comment replies have a comment_parent value set to the comment_ID of the parent review. The comment IDs are generated by WordPress when the comments are added to the database, so there is no way to export replies as separate comments at the same time as exporting reviews since there is no way to link them (as the comment ID doesn’t exist).

One thing I noticed was the Ajax spinning wheel took ages to load the paginated reviews page, but this might just be the staging environment from Kinsta.

This might just be the Kinsta staging environment. I have tested the SQL queries on sites with thousands of reviews with hardly any impact in performance.

I noticed it also only important 100 reviews each time I clicked the Import button but this may be by design. I manage to import them all by repeatedly clicking the import button until I got all 700 reviews.

I’ll look into this. The product review importer imports reviews in batches of 25, each batch is processed in its own thread in parallel until there are no more to process. If it stops at 100 each time, it may be due to a bug.

One thing I’m wondering if there’s also a code snippet/hook for the ability to reposition the review form to the top of the Reviews tab section in the Woocommerce single product page rather than someone having to scroll past all the reviews to leave their own review. Is this possible? I know my WP Discuz has this ability for comments.

You can add the woocommerce/reviews.php template file to your theme and modify it to switch the position of the form. Please see the FAQ on the Help & Support page which explains how to use template files in your child theme.

Also is it possible to disable the terms toggle from appearing in the form “This review is based on my own experience and is my genuine opinion.”?

Go to the Site Reviews > Settings > Addons > WooCommerce page and add “terms” to the hide option on the [site_reviews_form] shortcode like this:

[site_reviews_form assigned_posts="post_id" hide="title,terms"]

See also the Shortcodes documentation on the Help & Support page.

Wonderful, thanks for all the help! After migrating the plugin to the live site and enabling the pagination for the reviews my product pages are loading in under 0.5 second.