Stars

Fixed

• Every setting on the settings page rendered a bare warning icon with no text next to it. The "overridden by config" macro returned the whitespace between its own tags when a setting wasn't overridden, and Twig treats that non-empty string as a real warning. Only genuinely overridden settings show a warning now.

Changed

• Reworked the Review and Comment editor screens. Every field used to be packed into the sidebar, leaving the main body empty. The submission's own content — rating, name, email, review/comment text, pros, cons, and admin response — now renders in the body via an in-code field layout, laid out two-up where it reads better. The sidebar keeps just what's about the submission: its moderation status and the entry it belongs to, above the existing metadata.
• Validation errors now appear inline on the field that caused them, instead of only in the error banner.
• A reply's parent comment is now shown in the Comment sidebar as a "Reply To" link.

Fixed

• The Reviews and Comments CP sections rendered their element index as escaped HTML instead of a working index. Both templates now extend Craft's _layouts/elementindex rather than echoing the deprecated _elements/indexcontainer partial through renderTemplate().
• Frontend review and comment submissions returned a 500 error whenever notifications were enabled. The element saved, but rendering the notification email threw, because the plugin's email templates live in a control-panel-only template root and were being rendered in site template mode. They're now rendered in CP template mode, and a template failure is logged instead of breaking the submission.
• Review and Comment index columns showed raw values — the entry ID instead of the entry, the rating number instead of stars, and the lowercase status key instead of a labelled status. The custom column rendering was declared as tableAttributeHtml(), which Craft 5 renamed to attributeHtml(), so it was never called.
• Fixed the frontend form and review display examples in the README, which used a repeat filter that doesn't exist in Twig or Craft.

Known issues

• Reply notifications only fire when a reply is created with approved status, so with the default defaultStatus of pending they never send. Approving a reply later does not trigger them.

First public release on the Craft Plugin Store, for Craft CMS 5. Builds on the initial review system with a full comments system, a submitter blocklist, pluggable captcha, privacy controls, and an automated test suite.

Added

• Comments — a threaded comment system for entries, as a first-class element alongside reviews:
  • Four-state moderation, CP element index, and bulk actions (shared with reviews via a ModeratedElement base).
  • Threaded replies with a configurable maximum depth (maxCommentDepth); over-deep replies attach at the deepest allowed level.
  • Frontend submission (actions/stars/comments/save), optional login gating (commentsRequireLogin / commentsAllowAnonymous), and auto-filled author details for logged-in users.
  • craft.comments Twig API (tree, forEntry, topLevel, replies, count) and a bundled recursive stars/_comments/thread.twig macro.
  • Email notifications to moderators, plus reply notifications to the parent comment's author.
  • Comment permissions: view / manage / moderate / reply / delete.
• Blocklist — block submitters by email, IP, or user id. Enforced on both review and comment submission, with a CP management section, a "Block Author" bulk action, and a stars:manageBlocklist permission.
• Pluggable captcha — reCAPTCHA v3, reCAPTCHA v2, hCaptcha, and Cloudflare Turnstile, selectable per site. Applies to reviews and comments alike. craft.reviews.captcha() / craft.comments.captcha() expose the provider and site key for the frontend widget.
• Privacy controls — captureIpAddress, captureUserAgent, and captureReferrer settings to independently disable storing each piece of submission metadata (GDPR-style data minimization). All default to on.
• Reviewer/commenter email addresses are masked in error logs (e.g. a***@example.com).
• Automated test suite (Codeception + Craft's test framework), runnable via DDEV.

Fixed

• craft.reviews.averageRating() — and the ratingValue in the schema.org JSON-LD output — returned an incorrect value instead of the true average.
• The per-IP rate limiter flagged legitimate first-time submissions as spam, rejecting valid reviews whenever rate limiting was enabled (on by default).

Changed

• Spam rate limiting is context-aware (reviews vs. comments count against their own tables).
• The legacy enableRecaptcha / recaptcha* settings are superseded by captchaProvider / captcha* but are still honored (mapped to reCAPTCHA v3).
• New plugin icon.
• Licensed under the standard Craft License.

Added

• Initial release
• Review element type with star ratings (1-5 configurable up to 10)
• Four-state moderation: pending, approved, rejected, spam
• Pros/cons fields
• Admin response support
• Spam protection: honeypot, reCAPTCHA v3, rate limiting, submission time check
• Schema.org JSON-LD output (Review + AggregateRating)
• Email notifications on new submissions
• Twig variable craft.reviews for frontend queries
• User permissions for view, manage, moderate, respond, delete
• CP element index with bulk actions (approve, reject, mark as spam)