PHP Rating how to make

Learn how to use PHP rating system to rate items, with an example of rating books.

Creating a PHP Rating System

A rating system is a great way to let users rate content or products on your website. It allows you to gather feedback about what your users think about the content or products, and it also gives the user a sense of satisfaction when they can give their opinion. In this article, we will be looking at how to create a simple rating system using PHP.

The first step in creating a rating system is to create a database table to store the ratings. We will use the following columns in our table:

id 		INT 		AUTO_INCREMENT
user_id 	INT 		NOT NULL
rating 	INT 		NOT NULL

The id column will be used to store the unique identifier for each rating, the user_id column will be used to store the ID of the user who is rating the content, and the rating column will be used to store the rating itself.

Once we have our database table created, we can create a simple HTML form to allow users to rate the content. We will use radio buttons for the rating, and we will give each one a value from 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest rating and 5 being the highest.

<form action="submit.php" method="post">
	<h3>Please rate this content:</h3>
	<input type="radio" name="rating" value="1"> 1 <br>
	<input type="radio" name="rating" value="2"> 2 <br>
	<input type="radio" name="rating" value="3"> 3 <br>
	<input type="radio" name="rating" value="4"> 4 <br>
	<input type="radio" name="rating" value="5"> 5 <br>
	<input type="submit" value="Rate">
</form>

Once the form is submitted, it will be processed by our submit.php file. In this file, we will first check if the user is logged in and if not, redirect them to the login page. Then, we will get the rating from the form and the user's ID from the session. Finally, we will insert those values into our database table.

//Check if user is logged in
if (!isset($_SESSION['user_id'])) {
	header('Location: login.php');
	exit;
}

//Get rating from form
$rating = (int) $_POST['rating'];

// Get user_id from session
$user_id = (int) $_SESSION['user_id'];

// Insert rating into database
$sql = "INSERT INTO ratings (user_id, rating) VALUES (:user_id, :rating)";
$stmt = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute(['user_id' => $user_id, 'rating' => $rating]);

Now that we have our rating system set up, we can use it to display the average rating for each content. We can use a simple SQL query to get the average rating for each content:

SELECT AVG(rating) FROM ratings WHERE content_id = :content_id

With the average rating, we can then display it to the user on the page. We can also use this rating to order the content by rating, so that the highest rated content is displayed first.

By following these steps, you can create a simple yet effective rating system for your website using PHP.