[Solved] Trying to build user reviews based site [closed]

Question

It’s not clear from your question whether you are looking for a way to code this functionality or achieve it with plugins, or whether these are related to existing Woocommerce products or any product a user might choose. More specificity would help. However, since you used Trailspace as an example—there are several ways to do this.

I would probably create a custom post type of ‘review’ and custom taxonomies for the review post type. Then I would use Advanced Custom Fields to create the front-end review form. On form submit, it could add a new post of the post type ‘review’ and populate custom taxonomy tags based on the product’s brand name, model, etc. Reviews could be searched, displayed, filtered, and organized based on these tags.

You could allow users to submit a review for the same product brand & model by providing a form right below the original review, but with the brand & model fields already filled and read-only.

You could instead try to do it mostly with plugins by using a custom post types plugin, Gravity Forms, and the Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugin. In this case, submitting a Gravity form would make each form entry into a post. However, I still think achieving part 2 of what you wanted might require custom coding in order to get all reviews for the same product brand/model to link up to your custom taxonomies.

Edit:
Here is a tutorial I found on creating user-submitted posts with Gravity Forms and the Gravity Forms + Custom post types plugin. I have successfully used this combo to allow user-submitted testimonials that turn into posts. Consider using captcha and moderating entries before publishing to prevent spam. The ‘review’ type posts will use the default single.php post template unless you create a custom template to display them. Depending on exactly what you’re looking for, this might still require some custom coding. There might be plugins available to help with custom templates, but I have not used them before.

Accepted Answer

It’s not clear from your question whether you are looking for a way to code this functionality or achieve it with plugins, or whether these are related to existing Woocommerce products or any product a user might choose. More specificity would help. However, since you used Trailspace as an example—there are several ways to do this.

I would probably create a custom post type of ‘review’ and custom taxonomies for the review post type. Then I would use Advanced Custom Fields to create the front-end review form. On form submit, it could add a new post of the post type ‘review’ and populate custom taxonomy tags based on the product’s brand name, model, etc. Reviews could be searched, displayed, filtered, and organized based on these tags.

You could allow users to submit a review for the same product brand & model by providing a form right below the original review, but with the brand & model fields already filled and read-only.

You could instead try to do it mostly with plugins by using a custom post types plugin, Gravity Forms, and the Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugin. In this case, submitting a Gravity form would make each form entry into a post. However, I still think achieving part 2 of what you wanted might require custom coding in order to get all reviews for the same product brand/model to link up to your custom taxonomies.

Edit:
Here is a tutorial I found on creating user-submitted posts with Gravity Forms and the Gravity Forms + Custom post types plugin. I have successfully used this combo to allow user-submitted testimonials that turn into posts. Consider using captcha and moderating entries before publishing to prevent spam. The ‘review’ type posts will use the default single.php post template unless you create a custom template to display them. Depending on exactly what you’re looking for, this might still require some custom coding. There might be plugins available to help with custom templates, but I have not used them before.