WP Review Plugins Review

WordPress is a powerful platform that allows users to create serious database driven content powered websites with almost no technological expertise. WordPress is so powerful that fortune 500 companies use it and so easy that stay-at-home-mom-bloggers use it. No matter what your need, WordPress can match it.

To simplify WordPress even further and to add the functionality that many need, WordPress allows plugins. One category of those plugins, WordPress review plugins, allows you to transform WordPress in to a highly-interactive user-sponsored review site. These sites make a lot of people a lot of money (often people who are affiliates of other businesses run review sites) and as such, the market for WordPress review plugins can be considered very competitive.

There are four major products in the market right now. MyReviewPlugin, WP Review Engine, WF Review and WP Review Site, in order of their goodness.

MyReviewPlugin is the best of the bunch. It seems weird to start with the best, but in this case it really sets the stage.

Most WordPress review plugins offer features like star ratings, editor's ratings, user comments, comparison tables (although the other plugins here have really poor comparison tables compared to MyRP), etc. MyReviewPlugin goes the extra mile adding a powerful importer that imports from CSVs, YellowPages, RSS feeds, Google, and many more sources to quickly fill a website with content. MyReviewPlugin adds the most powerful comment generator, supporting generating comments with names from different decades in history, comment text that looks realistic and star ratings to go along with the comments.

Instead of talking about what all the plugins do (turn WordPress in to a review site), lets talk about what makes MyReviewPlugin special.

1. Import Man - while WF Review and WP Review Engine include "importers," they're quite weak compared to Import Man. When the new owner of WF Review announced his 4.0 update, he announced a bunch of new features that Import Man had had from 1.0, and nothing new. That's how advanced Import Man really is. Import Man allows the importing of star ratings from CSVs, a requested feature for all the other plugins that none of them offer; Import Man allows importing straight from the YellowPages; Import Man offers importing links right in to a link masking system called Link Man. Most importantly, MyReviewPlugin's importing functionality works with any sized database: the other's choke on large databases quite regularly, when they work at all.

When they work at all? I've tried all the plugins and other people I know have provided similar feedback about the other plugins. Their importers are finicky as can be. MyReviewPlugin's importer has always just worked for me. I don't know.

2. Automatic Embedding. God this is cool. MyReviewPlugin lets you integrate with any theme. So does WP Review Engine. MyReviewPlugin gives you a dozen ways to integrate - a dozen different locations - all the features to actually customize your integrations to look right with your theme (changing the colors, sizes, padding, and more right within the administration area). None of the other plugins let you customize your integrations and this leaves you with sites that look absolutely terrible.

3. Comparison Tables. WP Review Engine also includes comparison tables. As with autoembeds, they're no where near as good as MyREviewPlugin's. MyReviewPlugin allows you to control every aspect of your comparison table, and it allows you to build vertical comparison tables like the ones you see on pages where you can see the features/rating categories/whatever you want down the left, and the products across the top. You can also build traditional horizontal comparison tables of course.

4. Amazon-style 'Was this review helpful to you?' on reviews. This is the only script that offers that.

Some other reviews of MyReviewPlugin can be seen (in excerpt) on their testimonials page. MyReviewPlugin is also the cheapest of the bunch at just $90 for the single site license. $90 is very cheap given how quickly you can make that money back being an affiliate of the products you're reviewing. There's a dozen reviews all over the web from other people like this Squidoo page called "WP Review Sites". MyReviewPlugin rocks. Use it. Love it. Create with it.

WP Review Engine is a good competitor. WP Review Engine doesn't exceed MyReviewPlugin in any way except age. It's a few months older than MyReviewPlugin and at this point probably has a couple more users. Last I checked, WP Review Engine had 1200 active licenses, that number is probably closer to 1500 today.

Louis at WP Review Engine is often quite rude in his support replies. He was anyway, when I used WP Review Engine. I'm a full time MyReviewPlugin user now.

There are no features WP Review Engine has that MyReviewPlugin doesn't have. There's some different themes but MyReviewPlugin is compatible with any theme on the Internet and has a compatibility mode for WP Review Engine's themes.

All of that known, WP Review Engine is still a powerful script. If you use it and don't have a problem with it and don't need the new features of MyReviewPlugin, don't want to import content in to your site with anything more complicated than a direct import of content you generated in a CSV and you want to use themes that work well with WP Review Engine, then you probably have no reason to upgrade. I'll give you a little hint though: if you e-mail Mark, MyReviewPlugin's owner, he'll convince you to upgrade and give you a discount... at least he did for me.

I don't want this to sound like I'm trying to sell MyReviewPlugin. I'm just a happy customer trying to build a helpful Hubpage. I'm not even an affiliate to promote it! WP Review Engine is for its job, it's just not as good to MyReviewPlugin. There's no reason to buy WP Review Engine over MyReviewPlugin, but there's probably no reason to upgrade if you're already using WPRE.

WF Review was the brainchild of Nick Mattern. WF Review was the best import-script on the market before MyReviewPlugin was released, and is still far superior than WP Review Engine in that regard. If you want to run imported websites from CSV, WF Review is better than WP Review Engine, but Import Man that comes with MyRP is still better than them all. Of course, again, WF Review's importer is good enough that I don't feel there is any need to upgrade - its functional, when it works, and it doesn't fail on databases with 100k+ records like WP Review Engine does.

WF Review lacks in the user friendly and design side. Its nearly impossible to build a nice looking WF Review site. It comes with no themes today. Its "auto embedding" if you can call it that basically doesn't work with anything but the most rudimentary of implements.

The new owner of WF Review is a professional programmer which might mean good things. He isn't an experienced marketer or a web developer though and the features he has planned for WF Review seem weak. He isn't adding ANYTHING of real significance to WF Review 4.0, and he's calling it "WF Review Ultra" as though it's a new product now. I believe he's also breaking the promise to existing users that they would get free upgrades for life by charging for this upgrade. Bad call.