Australcode Product Reviews & Review Reminders for WooCommerce

Changelog

0.7.7

• Fixed: on the dashboard, the star next to the average rating sat far from the number and looked smaller. It now sits right next to it.

0.7.6

• Fixed: the review form for an order showed the customer’s name in French-style quotes («…») in English. It now uses English quotes, and the Spanish translations keep their own.

0.7.5

• Fixed: the dashboard counted the store’s replies as reviews, so «Average rating · 12 reviews» could show with 11 approved reviews, and a reply could appear under «Recent reviews». The counts, the average and the list now include only customer reviews; the star bars of the reviews list skip replies too.
• Fixed: in the Pro photo gallery layout each photo now fills its tile instead of sitting small inside a larger frame.
• Fixed: the shortcode box in the widget builder no longer spills out of its card.
• Changed: on the dashboard, the period selector of the review form funnel sits on one line with its «Apply» button; it stacks only on small screens.
• Changed: the screenshot captions for reminders and consent now describe what those screens show.

0.7.4

• Fixed: with «Enable the plugin» turned off, product pages no longer show the plugin’s rating number next to each review’s stars.
• Fixed: the Product reviews block and the Bricks, Elementor and Divi elements no longer repeat the product name on every card of a single product’s list, the same as the shortcode since 0.7.0. «Show product name» still forces it on or off; in Elementor and Divi it now has an «Auto» choice, and widgets that already had it set keep their choice.
• Fixed: the Pro and license screen (what Pro adds, license status, renewal) is translated again in Spanish (Chile and Spain).
• Changed: the Site Reviews import and wp acprv recalc build their database queries in a way Plugin Check no longer flags. No change in behaviour.
• Developers: the hooks added in 0.7.0 are now documented in the FAQ («Can I change the markup or the behaviour from my own code?»).

0.7.3

• Changed: the plugin’s page now lives at https://australcode.io/product-reviews/ (the old address redirects there).
• Fixed: the per-order review form could be stored by host page caches that ignore Cache-Control: no-store (measured on Kinsta), so a shopper could get another shopper’s form or a stale «not found» page. Every form URL now carries a query argument (acprv_nc), which page caches do not store, and an old link without it is redirected to the same page with it.

0.7.2

• Changed: wp acprv import site-reviews (without --dry-run) asks you to deactivate Site Reviews first: while it is active it reports a rating of 0 for many products and the recalculated averages came out wrong. The import reads Site Reviews’ data from the database, so it does not need the plugin active.
• Fixed: with an accent colour set in the settings, the text on buttons switches between white and dark for contrast (a light accent made white button text unreadable).
• Fixed: «Reviews follow only these rules» no longer releases a review that another plugin (an antispam) held before this one; it only overrides WordPress’s own manual approval.

0.7.1

• Added: «Reviews follow only these rules» (Settings › Reviews): when WordPress is set to approve every comment manually (often for blog comments), reviews are decided by the plugin’s rules instead, so 4–5 star reviews can publish on their own. Off by default.
• Added: filters="chips" shows the rating filters as a compact row of chips (All, 5★…1★, With photos), for pages where the summary next to the list already shows the bars.
• Added: the reminder email uses your WooCommerce email template (logo, colours and footer, like the other store emails). Turn it off in Settings › Reminders to keep the plain layout.
• Fixed: the star picker of the review form is drawn by the plugin, so it shows stars (not «1 of 5 stars» text) in themes and builders that do not load WooCommerce’s icon font, such as Bricks and block themes.
• Fixed: the accent colour from the settings now reaches the per-order form, buttons and progress bar (they used the kit’s default green), and form labels no longer take a theme’s label colour.
• Fixed: the «Sort by» label no longer wraps when the theme makes selects full width, the carousel arrows keep their size, and the review search field has a placeholder.

0.7.0

• Added: hold new reviews for approval by star rating (N stars or less) or by words and phrases you list (case- and accent-insensitive, whole words). Imported reviews keep their source status.
• Added: email the store when a review arrives (only pending ones or all, one by one or grouped hourly/daily), with your WooCommerce email template and direct approve/moderate links.
• Added: optional or required review title, a terms checkbox with a link to your terms page, and a configurable photo limit (1 to 10) in the product review form.
• Added: shoppers can search the reviews list (shortcode search="true", block, Bricks, REST search), sort it (including «Most helpful»), vote «helpful» from any list, and optionally report a review.
• Added: store replies are shown under each review in every layout with «Reply from «, and the customer can be emailed when you reply.
• Changed: the rating of each review on the product page carries the plugin’s translated label and the number next to the stars.
• Fixed: store replies no longer appear as separate reviews in the reviews list.
• Added: import from Site Reviews with wp acprv import site-reviews (use --dry-run first). Reviews that came from an existing WooCommerce review are completed instead of duplicated; photos, helpful votes, verified status, owner replies and moderation status come along; a parity report compares every product with Site Reviews. Running it again changes nothing, and wp acprv import undo site-reviews reverts it.
• Added: store reviews. Reviews about your store, not a product, live on a page you choose (by default the WooCommerce shop page). Show them with [acprv_reviews type="store"], or products and store together with type="all"; the summary, the blocks, the Bricks element and the REST endpoint accept the same option.
• Added: wp acprv recalc checks and fixes the review count and average rating of every product and of the store.
• Added: one review form per order. The reminder email now links to a single page (inside your theme, no login) where the customer rates every product of the order, and optionally your store, in a couple of minutes; each review can be sent on its own and edited later from the same link. «I have not tried it yet» skips a product. Address and validity (60 days by default) are configurable.
• Added: an optional «Review my purchase» button in the WooCommerce «Completed order» email, following the same consent and unsubscribe rules as the reminders.
• Added: an invitation to review your store on Google, on the thank-you page and optionally in the reminder email. It is shown to every customer whatever their rating and is never tied to the coupon.
• Added: a review form funnel in the dashboard (invitations sent, emails opened, forms viewed, orders with reviews) and, on each order, a box to copy the form link or send it by WhatsApp.
• Added: the review coupon can be issued once per order (when its first review from the form is approved) and can exclude products on sale.
• Added: the {review_form_link} placeholder for the reminder email template.
• Added: [acprv_rating], a compact rating (stars, average and number of reviews) for product cards and product pages built with a page builder, also on shop and category pages.
• Added: empty="hide" for [acprv_reviews] (and «Hide when there are no reviews» in the block, «Without reviews» in Bricks) prints nothing when there are no reviews to show.
• Changed: the per-order form keeps its private link in a cookie after the first visit and shows a clean address (/review/), so the theme’s analytics and the browser history no longer record it. It also sends no-store, no-referrer and noindex headers, opens only for paid orders, and stops opening when the order is refunded, cancelled or failed.
• Changed: visits from the store team, email link scanners and browser prefetch no longer count as form views in the funnel; a form accepts up to 60 submissions per hour.
• Changed: «Helpful» and «Report» buttons are always rendered neutral and the browser marks the ones you already used, so cached pages no longer show one visitor’s votes to everyone. Both buttons now name the review they belong to for screen readers.
• Changed: a review reported again after you approve it starts counting toward the hold threshold from zero; the team gets one email for the first report and one when the threshold is reached, and one person reports a review once, whatever browser they use.
• Changed: searches made without JavaScript (?acprv-q=) are marked noindex.
• Fixed: star-rating and phrase moderation rules now apply to reviews sent from the per-order form, including the title and edits (a 5-star review edited to 1 star goes back to pending), and the hold reason is saved for reviews created through the REST API too.
• Fixed: returning customers whose products were all reviewed already now reach the thank-you page; two cards sent at the same time no longer overwrite each other’s progress; editing a review keeps backslashes and does not re-moderate it when nothing changed; the photo limit message shows the form’s limit.
• Fixed: activating, updating or changing the form address no longer breaks the theme’s custom post type addresses (rewrite rules are flushed after everything is registered).
• Fixed: the email open count survives rotating the WordPress salts; the test email no longer creates an empty form.
• Fixed: store reviews can be voted on and reported, their replies (also imported ones) are shown, and they are included in the grouped review email.
• Fixed: the «+N» tile of the photo gallery appears when there are more reviews with photos than tiles.
• Fixed: a new search, filter or sort made while the list is still loading is no longer lost.
• Fixed: approving imported replies in bulk no longer emails the authors of old reviews.
• Fixed (Site Reviews import): undoing an import no longer issues coupons for old reviews and never deletes a review it did not create; an interrupted run leaves no half-written reviews (one transaction per review) and the next run recalculates every product; owner replies with «&» are no longer duplicated; reviews without a GMT date get one; the Site Reviews user is used when present; counts are updated once per run instead of once per batch; the Google feed cache is cleared; --store-target is used for the store totals; the totals report what was written and the command ends with an error if anything failed.

0.6.1

• Fixed: every database query now passes its table name as an escaped identifier instead of building it into the SQL text. No change in behaviour; it clears 19 Plugin Check warnings.
• Changed: the plugin ships a composer.json again (without any personal data), as Plugin Check expects when the vendor folder is included.

0.6.0

• Added: one-click unsubscribe in every reminder (link in the email and the List-Unsubscribe header). An unsubscribed email never receives another reminder.
• Added: WordPress’s «Export / Erase personal data» tools now cover reminders, review photos, review coupons and the reviews themselves (WooCommerce hides product reviews from the core tools), plus a suggested privacy-policy paragraph and a three-year retention for reminder records.
• Added: reminders are re-checked right before sending and scheduled only once per order and step; cancelled, refunded or trashed orders cancel them, reactivating the plugin puts pending ones back in the queue, and failed sends can be retried from the dashboard.
• Added: rating filters for shoppers, a «with photos» filter, «Show more reviews» without reloading, a compact layout and a photo lightbox that shows each photo next to its review. New Gutenberg blocks for the summary and the review button.
• Added (Pro): carousel and photo gallery layouts.
• Added: import from Judge.me, CusRev and Yotpo exports, semicolon or tab separated and Windows-1252 files, photos and store replies, day/month dates, and large files in the background. Exports can use the Excel format for comma-decimal locales.
• Changed: consent is now decided by what the customer saw at checkout, in the classic and the block checkout; orders without a billing country ask for consent. New installs start with the EEA and the UK on the list.
• Changed: the verified badge is checked live and needs proof that the email is the reviewer’s own (an account, or the link in the reminder email); a refund removes it, and only one verified indicator shows per review.
• Changed: the review coupon goes to verified buyers only, one per product, never depends on the star rating, and every review that earned one is labeled as incentivized and left out of the Google feed.
• Changed: photo uploads are off by default on new installs; photos stay private until the review is approved and lose their location data. Turning uploads off keeps published photos visible.
• Changed: Pro is now sold by number of sites (1, 5 or unlimited).
• Changed: the plugin now runs on PHP 8.1.
• Fixed: review lists could show reviews of private, draft or password-protected products.
• Fixed: the rating distribution percentages now add up to 100, and the review count ignores reviews without a rating.
• Fixed: helpful votes are counted once per person, and guests can vote on cached pages.
• Fixed: the Google feed only lists eligible reviews as plain text, and refreshes when products change.
• Fixed: the reminder email is sent in the store’s language and from the store’s address.
• Fixed: the block editor and every screen are fully translated into Spanish.

0.5.1

• Fixed: the list of Pro features rendered as a run-on block instead of a bulleted list, because WordPress strips the bullets back out. This affected every licence state, including the «What you get with Pro» screen that free sites see.
• Improved: the reminder email’s accent colour now has the same control as the rest of your settings — you can type or paste a hex code, and reset it to the default. Until now the colour swatch was the only way in, so a brand colour you had on the clipboard could not be entered.
• Improved: choosing a CSV to import now uses the plugin’s own file picker and shows the name of the file you picked, instead of the grey button your browser draws by default.
• Fixed: two admin pages showed a shortened plugin name in the browser tab, so the plugin appeared under two slightly different names depending on where you looked.

0.5.0

• Added: if your Pro license has lapsed, the plugin now tells you and takes you straight to renewing it, instead of offering you an upgrade you already bought. From the moment you hold a license, the menu entry reads «License» rather than «Upgrade», whatever state that license is in.
• Fixed: rich snippets no longer carry a GTIN that WooCommerce had deliberately left out. WooCommerce validates GTINs itself and drops the ones that fail its format check, or that belong to the parent product rather than the variation you are viewing — and the plugin was putting them straight back. A valid GTIN for the wrong product is the kind of error no validator catches, so the plugin now leaves GTINs entirely to WooCommerce.
• Fixed: your brand’s logo no longer disappears from the structured data. The plugin now fills the brand in only when nothing else did, so WooCommerce’s own brand entry — logo included — survives untouched.
• Fixed: a product with more than one brand value reported a brand that does not exist, by joining them into a single name such as «Acme | Globex». It now reports the first one.
• Changed: the widget builder adopts the shared panel layout used across our plugins, so the live preview follows you down the page consistently. On screens between 881 and 900 pixels wide the panel now stacks into one column, where before it stayed side by side.
• Fixed: the bundled LICENSE file was truncated and still carried unfilled template placeholders. It now ships the full GPL-2.0 text with the correct copyright holder.

0.4.2

• Changed: the plugin is now listed as «Australcode Product Reviews & Review Reminders for WooCommerce», so the review reminders it sends are visible in the name. Nothing else changes — same plugin, same settings, same data.
• Changed: the «Support Forum» link now takes free users to the WordPress.org support forum, where answers are public and searchable, so the next person with your question finds it too. Paid users keep the direct support channel.
• Fixed: marking a review as helpful could fail without saying so. The vote now confirms, and tells you when it could not be saved.
• Fixed: switched-off fields were unreadable. A disabled dropdown was too faint against its background to make out — now both the field and its label are legible.
• Fixed: the widget builder could not tell «no reviews match these settings» apart from «the preview failed to load», so both looked like an empty result. Each now says which it is, and a failed preview offers to retry.
• Fixed: the widget builder preview scrolled out of view on wide screens, leaving most of the panel empty. It now follows you down the page.
• Fixed: on phones, a review was rendered narrower than the summary above it, because of an indent WooCommerce adds for the avatar. Both now line up.
• Fixed: the review shortcode showed nothing at all on a product with no reviews yet. It now says so.
• Fixed: the CSV import wizard failed silently when the connection dropped, and did not say which columns it needs before you map them.
• Fixed: the stars on review cards and the photo hint text did not have enough contrast on light themes.
• Improved: keyboard focus rings, status badges and status dots are now legible on dark admin colour schemes.

0.4.1

• Fixed: on phones the «Was this helpful?» button was too small to tap comfortably — it now meets the 44px accessibility minimum, like the rest of the controls. It is the button that repeats on every review, so it is the one you hit most.
• Fixed: importing or exporting reviews no longer writes deprecation warnings to your error log on PHP 8.4 and newer. The CSV quoting is now stated explicitly, so an export re-imported later comes back byte-identical even after PHP changes its default.

0.4.0

• Added: Spanish (es-CL and es-ES) now ships with the plugin, for the free version too. Until now the translation was only bundled with the paid version, so free users always saw English.
• Added: a «Corner shape» option in the style panel — square, soft or round corners for the review widgets.
• Fixed: the review sorting buttons were invisible on dark themes. They now take their colour from your theme.
• Fixed: the verified-purchase badge did not have enough contrast to be readable on light or dark themes.
• Fixed: tap targets on phones — the rating stars, the photo picker and the sorting buttons are now large enough to tap comfortably.
• Fixed: on block themes, the review summary and the «Write a review» button could sit outside your content column.
• Fixed: the live preview in the widget builder lost its grid and card borders.
• Fixed: photos attached to reviews no longer stretch the rows of the WooCommerce review moderation list.
• Fixed: sorting by rating no longer implies it sorted every review when your reviews are split across pages.
• Fixed: the review widgets no longer inject themselves into the canvas while you are editing a page in Bricks, Elementor or Divi.
• Fixed: with a custom email template switched off, its fields now show they are not in effect, and the test email no longer uses a template that will not be sent.
• Improved: notices from our licensing provider now appear only on this plugin’s own screens instead of across your whole dashboard.
• Improved: clearer disclosure of what the «Contact Us» link sends, and a GDPR entry in the FAQ.
• Corrected: the plugin no longer claims WPML and Polylang compatibility — it never implemented it. Nothing changes in how the plugin behaves.

0.3.5

• Fixed: if you bought Pro but have not installed the Pro version yet, the plugin no longer invites you to buy it again. It now says your license is active and points you to the download.
• Fixed: on phones, the plugin’s own tabs no longer push the current page out of view — every tab is visible.
• Improved: the «Manage license» button now opens your account instead of the pricing page.

0.3.4

• Fixed: right after buying Pro, the free version could report the Pro features as active before the Pro version was installed — so it announced options it could not run yet. It now waits until the Pro version is running.
• Improved: small refinements to the admin styling, and the translation template now ships with the plugin so anyone can start translating it at translate.wordpress.org.

0.3.3

• Housekeeping: the free version no longer includes any Pro-only controls. The multi-step reminder options live entirely in the Pro version, in line with the WordPress.org guidelines.
• Changed: translations are no longer bundled in the download. WordPress.org generates and delivers them automatically through translate.wordpress.org.

0.3.1

• Housekeeping: the plugin no longer loads its translations manually. WordPress has done this automatically since 4.6, and the Spanish (es-CL, es-ES) translations keep working exactly as before — verified on WordPress 6.5.

0.3.0

• Now free: automatic discount coupons for reviews. Thank every approved reviewer with a WooCommerce coupon, emailed automatically. This used to require Pro.
• Now free: the Google Shopping product reviews feed. Publish your ratings so they can appear in Google Shopping. This used to require Pro.
• Improved: the coupon amount is now capped at 100 for percentage coupons (a fixed cart amount is still uncapped), so a mistyped value cannot create a coupon worth more than the cart.
• Changed: Pro now focuses on two things, both about scale — multi-step reminders and the visual email editor with test sending.
• Changed: the Pro code is no longer shipped inside the free download. Pro features are built into the Pro version only, which is what WordPress.org asks for.
• New: a «Contact Us» entry in the plugin menu, so you can reach us from the plugin itself.
• Fixed: the colour pickers in Display style now show the colour the plugin actually uses when you leave a field empty. The star swatch offered green while stars render orange.

0.2.1

• Improved: the License screen now shows what your Pro plan includes instead of an empty page, and the licence box no longer overflows on narrow phones.
• Fixed: the admin menu entry reads «License» once Pro is active, instead of still inviting you to upgrade.
• Fixed: the upgrade screens are now fully translated into Spanish (es-CL and es-ES).
• Fixed: the Pro feature list on the upgrade and settings screens now describes what Pro actually does — it no longer mentions per-country reminder delays or a product feed, neither of which exists.

0.2.0

• New: Widget builder — a visual admin screen to configure a reviews widget, preview it live and copy a ready-to-paste shortcode.
• New: [acprv_summary] and [acprv_form] shortcodes to place the rating summary and the review form anywhere, independently from the reviews list.
• New: per-instance display options (columns, heading, product scope, sort and order, and toggles for date, photos, verified badge, product name and helpful count) for the [acprv_reviews] shortcode, the Gutenberg block and the Bricks, Elementor and Divi widgets.
• Improved: Spanish (es_CL, es_ES) translations updated to cover the new widget options.

0.1.0

• Initial release: self-hosted reminder engine, geo-aware consent, verified-buyer badge, rating summary with sorting, photo reviews, helpful votes, JSON-LD structured data, CSV import/export, style panel, and display via shortcode, Gutenberg block and Bricks/Elementor/Divi widgets.