My Restaurant Reviews “” a WordPress plugin

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Screenshot of My Restaurant Reviews widget

This post is long delayed. It should have been an announcement but will now be a backstory.

Back in May (4 months ago!), I did a website redesign for SkewerSpot, our family business. SS is a cute little restaurant/cafe in Jalandhar, Punjab, with a wide selection of snacks and waffles. We specialize in waffles, all sorts, especially stick waffles. Earlier the SS website was a pure Bootstrappy static thing. The design had become outdated, and it was difficult to maintain. So I redid the entire thing in WordPress. It looks pretty neat now, go check it out!

At that time, I was faced with a very specific problem. We have our online presence on Zomato, Swiggy, Google Maps, Instagram and Facebook. We get reviews on all these five platforms. I wanted a way of showing reviews/ratings from these sources in a unified interface. To address this specific problem, I created a specific WordPress plugin. It’s called My Restaurant Reviews (or ‘Mr.R’).

I wanted to create this as a dirty, cowboy-style plugin for my own website. But I soon realized it’d be cool to have others also benefit from it, since a lot of new-gen restaurants are cropping up each day that perhaps face the same problem that I did. So off I went to the awesome WordPress Plugin Handbook, read it cover-to-cover, and got to work. Within a couple of weeks, I had the first working version. Writing code in PHP again was nostalgically pleasant experience. I learned so much about the internals of WordPress, my respect for the platform and its code quality increasing everyday.

Anyway, in early June I finished it, and submitted it for publishing on the great WordPress Plugins Directory. What a scary name, haha! Thankfully, it was accepted after a short review. I’ve heard that there’s a rigorous review process for all plugin and theme submissions, and some contributions are rejected daily for not following their coding standards. Didn’t happen to me 🙂

You can find and install it on your own WordPress website or blog from its official plugin page. Source code is on GitHub. There’s still so many improvements that can be done, especially in terms of adding support for more review platforms (currently only Zomato and Google Maps are supported). See TODO. With my arms spread, I invite ya’ll to help me take it to the next level.

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