OCW Reviews

Description

OCW Reviews helps you collect, manage and display customer reviews directly on your WordPress site — no external widgets, no subscriptions, and no vendor lock-in. Invite customers by email or WhatsApp, track responses with secure tokens, and display approved reviews using flexible shortcodes and a clean card layout.

The plugin is fully functional and free. Nothing is locked or time-limited.

This is an independent plugin. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by WhatsApp LLC, Meta Platforms, Inc., Google LLC or Automattic. “WhatsApp”, “Google” and “Gravatar” are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to say what the plugin talks to.

Features

• Custom Post Type for reviews and a service/product taxonomy
• Star ratings and optional anonymous display (names are partially masked)
• Reviewer avatars from generated initials, with optional Gravatar (off by default)
• Shortcodes: [rvst_reviews], [rvst_review_form], [rvst_reviews_summary]
• Invitation system via email or WhatsApp with per-invite tracking tokens
• Invitation Log drag-and-drop workflow board (Invited → Reminded → Responded → No response) with an automatic 8-day reminder
• Fully editable email templates (subject, header, body, footer) for invitations, reminders and thank-you emails
• Automatic thank-you email and an automatic reminder workflow
• Setup wizard and tutorial page
• Honeypot and rate-limiting to reduce spam
• Fully self-hosted — the free plugin makes no outgoing third-party calls unless you enable Gravatar

Optional PRO version

A separate, optional premium plugin — OCW Reviews PRO — is available from https://onlinecursuswebsites.nl/review-starter-pro and adds extra features on top of this free plugin: CSV bulk import & bulk invitations, automatic review requests from WooCommerce orders, SEO rich snippets (star ratings in Google results), reviewer photo upload, extra card designs, webhooks, and Google Reviews import. It is a standalone download and is not part of this free plugin; installing it simply adds those extra features. Nothing in this free plugin is disabled or gated.

Shortcodes

• [rvst_reviews] — displays approved reviews as cards. Attributes: service (a service/product slug or ID, or a comma-separated list to combine several, e.g. service="mvk-player,rankly"), columns, per_page, orderby, order.
• [rvst_review_form] — displays the review submission form. Attribute: service (a single service/product to pre-select).
• [rvst_reviews_summary] — displays average rating and total review count. Attribute: service (slug/ID, or a comma-separated list).

The older names [review_starter], [review_starter_form] and [review_starter_summary] still work and do exactly the same thing, so pages written before version 2.10.0 keep working untouched. Use the rvst_ names for anything new.

External services

The plugin works without contacting anything. Two things reach outside the site, and both need a deliberate action first.

Gravatar (Automattic, Inc.) — optional, off by default
What it is used for: showing a reviewer’s own avatar on a review card instead of their generated initials.
When it happens: only while Settings → Display → Show Gravatar avatars is switched on, and only for reviews that carry an email address and are not marked anonymous. The card is rendered by the visitor’s browser, which then requests the image from gravatar.com.
What is sent: an MD5 hash of the reviewer’s email address, as part of the image URL, plus whatever the visitor’s browser sends with any image request (IP address, user agent).
Turn it off and nothing is sent. The setting ships off.
Terms: https://automattic.com/terms/ — Privacy: https://automattic.com/privacy/

WhatsApp (WhatsApp LLC / Meta Platforms, Inc.) — only when you click Send
What it is used for: opening WhatsApp with your invitation text pre-filled, so you can send it yourself.
When it happens: only when you choose WhatsApp as the channel and click Send on the Invitations page. The plugin builds a https://wa.me/... link and your browser opens it; the site’s server never calls WhatsApp and no message is sent without you pressing send in WhatsApp itself.
What is sent: the phone number you entered and the invitation text, as part of that URL.
Terms: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/terms-of-service — Privacy: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy

Nothing else leaves the site: no analytics, no licence check, no phone-home. The Getting Started link on the tutorial page is an ordinary link to Vimeo that opens only if you click it; no video is embedded.

Technical details