RIACO Reviews – Customer Reviews & Testimonials

RIACO Reviews lets you manually collect, manage, and display customer reviews and testimonials anywhere on your WordPress site — no page builder required. Add the Reviews block in the Gutenberg editor and get a live preview instantly, or drop in the [riaco_reviews] shortcode on any page or widget area.

Every review is a native WordPress post with its own star rating, author, avatar, review date, source platform, and product. Display options, layout, card style, and colours are all configurable directly from the block inspector panel — no CSS editing required.

Why RIACO Reviews?

• Works with any theme — lightweight, BEM-structured CSS, no opinionated framework dependencies.
• Three card styles — Default, Modern, and Minimal — each designed to suit a different aesthetic without installing extra plugins.
• Two responsive layouts — Grid and Masonry — that adapt to any container width automatically. No fixed breakpoints.
• Colour control — customise card background, text, borders, star colour, product badge colours, font size, and line height directly from the block editor.
• Built for WordPress — uses a custom post type, standard taxonomies, native media uploader, and WordPress hooks throughout.

Features

Display & Layout

• Gutenberg block with server-side rendering and a live preview via ServerSideRender. All settings in the Inspector sidebar.
• Shortcode [riaco_reviews] — use it in any page, post, widget area, or theme template.
• Grid layout — CSS auto-fill grid; column count adapts automatically to available width.
• Masonry layout — CSS columns with break-inside: avoid; same adaptive behaviour.
• Three card styles — Default (header with title and source logo), Modern (compact header with avatar, author, and inline star rating), Minimal (large title, no avatar, source name as text).
• Configurable minimum card width — sets the --riaco-card-min-width CSS custom property that drives both layouts.

Per-Review Data

• Review headline (post title)
• Review body (post content)
• Author name and avatar (falls back to a generated initials badge when no photo is provided)
• Star rating — 1 to 5 stars
• Review date (separate from the publish date — enter the date the customer left the review)
• Source platform — assign a platform like “Google”, “Trustpilot”, or “WordPress.org” with its logo
• Source URL — link to the original review on the external platform
• Product / subject — label each review with what it refers to; set a URL and schema.org type per product for structured data

Visibility Toggles

Show or hide each element independently:

• Review title
• Author name
• Author avatar / initials
• Star rating
• Review date
• Source platform logo
• Product badge
• Card drop shadow

Filtering

• Filter displayed reviews by product — show only reviews assigned to a specific product or subject.
• Block editor: choose a product from the “Filter by Product” dropdown in the Display Settings panel.
• Shortcode: pass product="my-product-slug" (comma-separated slugs for multiple products).

Sorting

• By date (newest or oldest first)
• By star rating (highest or lowest first)
• Random (shuffle on every page load)

Colour & Typography Overrides

Override directly from the block editor or shortcode attributes:

• Card background colour
• Card text colour
• Card border colour
• Star colour
• Product badge background and text colour
• Font size (rem)
• Line height

Admin

• Dedicated Reviews menu in the WordPress admin
• Custom admin list table with columns for author, rating, source logo, product, and review date
• Media-uploader integration for author avatars and source logos

JSON-LD Structured Data

• Automatically outputs schema.org Review structured data in a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in the page footer — no setup required.
• Each review card produces one Review object with reviewBody, reviewRating, author, datePublished, url, and itemReviewed.
• itemReviewed is driven by the product assigned to the review: set a URL and a schema.org type (Product, SoftwareApplication, LocalBusiness, Organization, Book, Movie, Course, Event, or the generic Thing) on each product in Reviews → Products.
• Reviews without a product fall back to the review headline as itemReviewed.name with type Thing.
• Multiple reviews on the same page (from one or more blocks/shortcodes) are combined into a single @graph array — one <script> tag regardless of how many shortcodes are on the page.
• Use the riaco_reviews_json_ld_data filter to modify or suppress the structured data for individual reviews.

Developer-Friendly

• riaco_reviews_atts — filter display attributes before rendering
• riaco_reviews_query_args — modify the WP_Query before it runs (add tax queries, post__in, etc.)
• riaco_reviews_card_meta — add or modify per-review metadata before the card template receives it
• riaco_reviews_card_template_path — swap in a custom card template per style or per post
• riaco_reviews_before_card / riaco_reviews_after_card — inject markup around individual cards
• riaco_reviews_before_loop / riaco_reviews_after_loop — inject markup around the whole reviews wrapper
• riaco_reviews_no_reviews_html — replace the empty-state message
• riaco_reviews_layouts / riaco_reviews_card_styles / riaco_reviews_orderby_options — register custom values for layout, card style, and sort order
• riaco_reviews_init / riaco_reviews_loaded — plugin lifecycle actions for third-party extensions
• riaco_reviews_block_render_atts — map additional Gutenberg block attributes into the render pipeline
• riaco_reviews_json_ld_data — modify or suppress the structured data object for a single review before it is collected

Perfect For

• SaaS companies — showcase user testimonials on landing pages with star ratings and platform logos (G2, Capterra, Product Hunt).
• Freelancers and agencies — display client testimonials with a clean Minimal card style.
• eCommerce stores — highlight product reviews filtered by product name in a Grid layout.
• WordPress plugin and theme authors — show WordPress.org reviews with source logo and link to the original listing.
• Local businesses — display Google or Yelp reviews with the platform logo and a link to the source.
• Course creators and coaches — collect student testimonials and display them in a Masonry layout with avatars.

Shortcode Reference

Basic usage:

[riaco_reviews]

All parameters:

[riaco_reviews count="6" layout="grid" card_style="default" orderby="date" order="DESC" product="" show_title="1" show_author_name="1" show_avatar="1" show_date="1" show_rating="1" show_source="1" show_product="1" show_shadow="1" min_width="300"]

Colour and typography:

[riaco_reviews card_bg="#ffffff" card_text_color="#444444" card_border_color="#e4e4e7" star_color="#f59e0b" product_bg="#f4f4f5" product_text_color="#18181b" font_size="0.9375" line_height="1.7"]