Everest Review Review: Display Admin And User-Submitted Reviews

Interested in a review about a review plugin? It’s a little bit meta, but that’s what I’m about to do today.

I’m going to write an Everest Review review. No, that’s not a typo. I really am reviewing a plugin named Everest Review.

As you’d expect from the name, Everest Review helps you add a review box for your own reviews, as well as letting you accept and display detailed user-submitted reviews.

So if you need to display either admin or user reviews on your site, give this one a read!

Everest Review Review: What The Plugin Does

Everest Review handles both admin and user reviews (or both at the same time!).

That means you can use it to:

• Add your own review boxes to your content
• Allow users to submit their own ratings on a specific page
• Add your own review box AND display user reviews as part of the same box

So no matter which approach you’re looking for, Everest Review can handle it.

You can also configure all of the review options on a page-level basis. So if you want to, for example:

• Only have an admin review on POST A
• Have both admin and user reviews on POST B

You can totally do that with Everest Review.

Beyond that, it also has:

• 5 different pre-built review templates
• 5 different pre-built review forms (for user reviews)
• Tons of configuration options to customize those pre-built options
• 7 different review types (e.g. stars, percentages, etc.)
• Filter and pagination options to help people sort through user reviews
• Google ReCaptcha for spam blocking
• Custom review parameters for both admin and user reviews
• Option to restrict reviews to registered users
• Shortcode review insertion or automatic insertion before/after content

And finally, one nice thing I noticed when going through the plugin is that it makes it easy to change pretty much every text string on your review boxes. So if you want to translate it into a different language, that should be pretty easy for you to do.

Hands-on With Everest Review

There are two core parts to Everest Review:

• Publishing your own reviews
• Accepting user reviews

I’ll cover both in this hands-on section, but let’s start with the former!

Creating Your Review Template

When you install Everest Review, the first thing that you need to do to start publishing your reviews is create a Review Template.

If you’ll be creating different types of reviews, you can set up multiple review templates to better fit each type of review. Otherwise, you only need to create one template to use the plugin.

Your template basically defines the:

• Layout
• Rating type
• Review parameters
• Styles and text strings

And if you want to allow user reviews, you’ll also be be able to configure some stuff about those here.

At the top, you can choose from one of the 5 included layouts and as well as what type of rating to use:

Below, you can choose the different parameters that you want to review. These are basically the individual components that you want to rate – for example, you could do something like:

• Price
• Ease of Use
• Customer support

And you can also further customize styling, as well as change the strings on some parts of your review. For example, you could change the “Pros” column to “Advantages” or something similar.

Below that, you can set up the user review section. If you want, you can link this section to a user review form (more on that in a second!). And as with the admin review section, you can use these settings to control all of the text and icons used in this section:

And that’s pretty much it for creating the review template. Just Publish and you’re finished.

Turning On Everest Review

Once you create your Review Template, you’ll need to actually enable the review feature. You can do that by going to Everest Review → General Settings.

In those options you can:

• Enable the review functionality
• Choose which post types to enable reviews on
• Choose a default review template
• Set up the user review form (more on this in the next sections)
• Choose positioning and ordering
• Some other settings for user review authorization and approval

Once you do that, you’ll get a new Everest Review Box meta box on the post types that you enabled reviews for.

The first box lets you configure technical details. While you set the defaults in the previous step, you can change things up on a per-post basis as needed:

And the second box lets you actually enter your review:

When you publish your post, you’ll see your review box:

Adding a User Review Form

If you want to allow user reviews, you’ll need to set up a User Review Form by going to Add Review Form.

You’ll see a similar interface to the Add Review Template interface. Here, you can:

• Choose a layout
• Set user review parameters
• Build your form using a drag and drop builder
• Set up Recaptcha
• Configure various text strings
• Configure the notification message that you get when someone submits a review

While you can collect email addresses here, it would be nice if there were some easy integration to get those email addresses into your email marketing service of choice.

Putting It All Together: How My Review Section Looks

Once I added a review form to my review from before, it looks like this underneath the Pros and Cons:

Once a user review is submitted, you can see it in the backend by going to User Reviews. Depending on whether you chose to manually approve reviews, you might need to also approve new reviews from this interface:

And on the front-end, you’ll see the user reviews as part of your review box (you could also turn off the admin part of the review box if you just want to showcase user reviews):

Applying Everest Review To A Practical Situation – Theme Reviews

Before I round things up, let me show you a more practical example of Everest Review. While you can use Everest Review for everything from restaurant reviews to product reviews, here’s a nice demo example of what a fully built out theme review box might look like with Everest Review:

How Much Does Everest Review Cost?

Everest Review normally costs $18 and is for sale at Code Canyon, which means it comes with standard Envato licensing.

As an introductory offer, it’s actually currently on sale for $15, but I’m not sure how long that pricing will be valid for.

Final Thoughts on Everest Review

Everest Review is a fine plugin. It gives you a good deal of control over your reviews and the user reviews feature offers a nice implementation that allows users to submit more in-depth reviews than some other plugins I’ve seen.

With that being said, other than price, I’m struggling to come up with a stellar reason to recommend Everest Review over some of the more established premium review plugins.

The backend interface is not as user-friendly as I’d like and, while the user review feature is nice, it lacks some of the more advanced features that a plugin like Reviewer offers.

If you need a plugin that allows user reviews and are on a budget, I’d say give Everest Review some consideration. But I would love to see some improvements in user experience and some deeper functionality before I give it a full recommendation.

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