texas-bronius's sandbox: Rate Referenced

The Challenge

It appears that all out-of-box Drupal voting modules like to rate specific content. Our system, however, is about rating all the terms attached to a node behind the scenes without the user knowing it-- think Spotify or Pandora where the user thumbs up or down a track but is really rating item attributes behind the scenes.

Solution: Rate Referenced

Rate 2 (no official dev release available at the time of posting this) lets the user vote on any entity (node, taxonomy term..), and Rate Referenced cascades that vote down to an entity referenced on the entity (ex, a taxonomy term) which has its own rate field and widget.

Example: Think like Pandora

* A song as a Node
* Songs' categories (genres, style, instrumentation) as Taxonomy Terms
* User votes "on the Song," but the rating we care about is actually on the song's specific categories

Side effect: One challenge of any voting system to +1/-1 on the node is that we still have to track that the user has already voted on that node. We can ignore this or use that to our advantage. Voting API module (rate module in its thumb up/down config) allows us to vote on a node as out-of-box functionality provides, but this module works behind the scenes as a reaction of the vote-casting (using voting_rules module) to automatically vote up or down all the terms on that node, and the user never sees this. You could then also give the user an interface to manually manipulate his own term voting, if that's part of your business requirements.