Review Wizard System Review: Actual Use and Plugin Improvements

Today I will do a review on Review Wizard Sytem Pro License, the review plugin for wordpress developed by Brett Rutecky. I just want to remind you that this review is for the upgraded version of the Review Wizard System plugin, which has additional features that is absent on the front-end product, and to give you a brief history, I have actually heard of this WordPress review plugin a couple of months ago when the product was still under development because Brett offered this as a bonus to become a beta tester of this WP review plugin when he was promoting WP Site Guardian, however, I was not able to avail his offer because at that time, I have no interest for the plugin but when I started this blog just a few months ago, I remembered that plugin again because I was planning to do some product reviews from time to time and I will be needing one of the WP review plugins that I can use on my blog, and although there were already several existing review plugins that can do this job, I was really curious about this plugin, and as a matter of fact, I requested review access for this but I was denied because I did not meet the requirements so I just waited for it to get launched.

Come launch day, I immediately bought this review plugin for WordPress and at that time, I was just really planning to buy the front end product only, but unfortunately, the feature that I really need is not available on the front end, but is available on the Pro version and since I really “need” that feature, I tried to think about it for a moment and weigh the pros and cons of buying it, but in the end, I was able to justify myself on buying the pro version, hoping that I made the right decision, but to tell you honestly, when I tried it the first time, I was really not that impressed, it doesn’t look good on my blog and the plugin has a bug that I have to correct myself, and if you’ll ask me if I really made the right decision, well, I will just explain to you by sharing my experience with the plugin by reading below

User Experience

After Purchase

After purchase, in order to get your plugin, you will need to create an account at the Review Wizard System website, the process is really simple and straight forward and does not need further explanation.

Member’s Area

The member’s area is well organized and properly labeled so you know where you need to go, On the home dashboard, you will be greeted by a welcome video of Brett and below that video are the download buttons for the plugin. Also, this is the dashboard for the developer version, I think for FE purchase, the “Extra Ranking Training” and “Bonus Webinar Reply” will not be seen, as well as the download button for the Review Wizard Pro (duh!)

here is a sneak peak of the main training videos

and below is the screenshot of the Extra Ranking Training exclusive for Pro buyers

and Bonus Webinar replay

Brett also provides these bonuses to anyone who get the Review Wizard System plugin

as well as other bonus from his affiliate partners

So thats the sneak peak of the members area, now let’s go to the meat of this review, and that is on using the plugin itself

Installation and User Interface

Review Wizard System Pro plugin is just like any other WordPress plugin, and the installation is pretty much the same. Once installed, a dedicated menu for the plugin will become an available option in your admin area, just click it to go to the Review Wizard main settings page which looks like this.

The setting is pretty simple. You are allowed to provide four categories on which your review will be based on. You can also choose different colors for the review box, as well as the star type for your review. I didn’t really customised this and just leave the default configuration as is because I really have nothing to change including the review categories.

Usage

When you go to your normal posts, you will find that a new box for the Review Wizard System is available and that is the one you need to customise whenever you want to make your post review-ready since it will activate the plugin for that particular post. Just choose “Yes” in the Use ratings to activate it, then populate all the needed fields such as the ratings, Product Name, etc. The process is really simple and there’s not much to customise in this part aside from providing the needed details that the plugin is asking. You can leave other fields blank. but make sure to enter the Product Name which is needed for the schema.org, which I will explain later.

When you’re finished writing your review, just publish your post and the plugin will do the rest

The Appearance and the Flaws

Here is an example of the output by the Review Wizard Pro plugin, and to tell you the truth, I actually didn’t like the way it looked on my blog and I really can’t consider it as one of the best review plugin for wordpress, also the initial release of this plugin has actually a bug. As you can see from the image below,  the date shows up which is really unnecessary since I already have a date below my Post title.

Here is the bug that I found on the plugin, which is also attributed to the image above. As you see on the schema.org snippet, the datePublished has no  values returned when in fact it should be the date when the post is published. I tried to fix this bug on my own and I was successful but I also contacted Brett to let him know about this so he can update the plugin for the benefit of the other users.

Another thing about this WordPress review plugin that I noticed is that the overall computation has no provision for partial stars. Like for the rating of this review, when you average the ratings, it should result to 3.25 stars, but as you see in the screenshot, it was rounded to 3 stars, it actually left me annoyed a bit, considering that I know Brett develops quality plugins, but this one, not really that much, and can’t really be considered as one of the best wordpress review plugins, although I still didn’t lose my faith on this one so I tried to make a way to make this work for me, which I will explain later, and although I have a lot of negative things to say about this, I still have some room for loving this piece of software, and here are those:

Makes your blog review-ready

It was actually one of the reasons why I bought this review plugin for WordPress, to make my blog ready for product reviews and this plugin does the job in that aspect

Generates Google Review Schema

Review Wizard also serves as a Schema.org WordPress plugin, and this was actually the sole reason why I bought the developer license, so that when my review post gets ranked on google, the ratings also appear just like this (not mine  though, just an example)

And why would you actually want to have a Schema.org plugin? One thing, it makes your site stand out from the rest of the google search result that has no star rating.

Plugin modification for improvement

This was the thing that I was trying to tell earlier, I found many things that I wish to improve, and since I have the developer license, I am allowed to modify the plugin for my personal use and my clients’ use, and instead of getting a refund, I just tried to improve this WordPress review plugin that will suit my taste, and I think I have really done a good job on it, considering that I only know little about PHP. Want to know the things that I did? Here it goes…

Improved the Post Review Settings

I added some additional fields such as the product price and currency, so it will also appear on the review once the post is published.

Modified review box output that suit to my taste

If you see the original look of the review box, it really doesn’t look that good on my site, maybe others will say that it’s ok, but for me, I wasn’t really satisfied with the way it’s positioned, and the styles used. What I like is I want it to look sharp, and by looking sharp, I mean something like this one

As you can see, I added the product name and the product price, modified the unnecessary font formats, and not only that; you see, if you look closer to the star ratings, you can see this:

Yup, my Review Wizard Pro plugin can now calculate partial ratings! Nice right? And aside from that, there’s actually one more thing that I did to this WP review plugin that really made it more badass, and that is the one below

Improved Google Review Schema.org

So I took a 1 hour internet crash course to learn how the schema works, and I actually learned a lot in that short span of time, like you can add the price, the vendor, description, and a whole lot more, and that’s what I actually did, and the resulting Google Review Schema.org now looks like this

So maybe when my site shows up in Google, it will look something like this because of the modifications I made to the Schema.org WordPress plugin

You see, this one has a review rating, as well as the price, and maybe the modified Schema.org will provide those on my reviews as well, but I still don’t know, we’ll have to see later on when my reviews somehow appear on the Google search.

Summary

Overall, even though I can’t consider this as one of the best WordPress review plugins, I believe the Review Wizard System Pro is still a good investment, considering the fact that I didn’t like it at first, it actually paved the way for me to do something even better. It’s actually the first time that I tried to do a significant modification to a WordPress plugin, and I won’t be able to do it if not for this plugin, so it’s really a blessing in disguise, and who knows, maybe in the future I will be able to develop my very own plugins. I also recommend this product not just because of the plugin, but because it also comes with the training on how to do review blogs, so if you have plans to start a review blog in the future, I believe the included training will provide you the right blueprint that you can follow to succeed in this kind of venture.

I guess that wraps up my review for this WordPress review plugin, also, just to remind you, the price of the developer license is $47 but you still have to buy the Front End product first which costs $24.95 for the early bird buyers and it goes up to $37. All in all, I paid $71.95 for this, but I believe it’s worth it considering the additional knowledge that I got from modifying it. If you want to try this plugin, just click this link. The vendor gives a 14 day money back guarantee so if this plugin doesn’t meet your standards, you can request for a refund and they will give your money back with no questions asked.

P.S.  I was actually planning on selling my service to install my modded Review Wizard System Pro plugin, but since I am really being nice right now, I will be giving it away for free if you buy the front end product thru my link. I actually messaged Brett regarding this and he said I can do it as long as I will be the one to install it on my clients’ websites and handle the support.

So there guys, all you have to do is buy the front end product of the review wizard and just send me the JVZoo Receipt ID to receive a free copy of my modded version of Review Wizard System. I am also giving a massive discount on your Review Wizard purchase when you buy thru my link, just use the code “WPISLIFE50RW” upon checkout to get a 50% off your purchase. So what are you waiting for? Get your copy now!

Get My Mod

That’s all guys, ciao for now

UPDATE (Feb 22, 2017):

I just recently checked the indexed pages of website on google search to validate if the review schema.org script that I added is working. It actually surprised me to see that the star ratings for some of my posts are already appearing including the price! 😀 Check out the screenshot below