Goal
Let people read and write star-rated reviews on the listings in your app — and decide exactly how those reviews look and behave along the way: whether a review needs your approval before it goes live, what the stars look like, and the wording on the review form, the Reviews screen, and the confirmation messages users see after they submit.
Reviews aren’t something mam-main handles on its own — that’s the job of the MAM Reviews Manager plugin (mam-reviews-manager). Turn it on and entitle it, and it adds a review summary, a review list, and a review submission form to your listing detail screens, plus an optional Reviews screen and a My Reviews area where people can see what they’ve submitted. Most of what you’ll configure — behavior and wording alike — lives on a standalone Reviews settings screen the plugin adds at Mobile App Manager → Reviews. A handful of display flags (home-screen reviews, hiding stars, custom star images) stayed behind in mam-main‘s Listings settings group.
Prerequisites
- Admin access to Mobile App Manager.
mam-mainactive.- MAM Reviews Manager (
mam-reviews-manager) entitled and active. This is the plugin doing the actual work — the review content sections, the submission flow, and the Reviews settings screen all come from it. Without the entitlement, it quietly steps aside, and none of the reviews UI or settings below will show up. - A source plugin that owns the listings being reviewed (for example, mam-geodirectory). Reviews attach to listing content, so the review content sections register against the GeoDirectory listing content type, and the listings themselves have to come from somewhere. Reviews Manager figures out the right provider for each listing (GeoDirectory, WooCommerce, or plain WordPress comments) so the app always shows the same ratings your website does.
Source-of-truth note: your source plugins and their providers decide which listing types can be reviewed. The settings on this page just turn the feature on and style it — they don’t determine what’s reviewable in the first place.
Steps
1. Turn reviews on
There’s no separate on/off switch here — reviews turn on the moment you entitle and activate MAM Reviews Manager. Once the plugin is active, it registers the three review content sections — Reviews Header, Reviews, and Add Review — for your listing detail screens and backfills them automatically, so reviews just appear without any extra flipping. If a listing detail screen shows no reviews UI, open App Setup → Content Sections for that screen and check that the three sections are present and visible.
Want reviews to show up somewhere besides the listing detail screen? Two optional settings extend their reach:
| Setting | Variable | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Show Reviews on Homescreen? | listing_show_homescreen_reviews |
mam-main → Listings |
Surfaces recent reviews on the app’s home screen. |
| Link reviews from Home screen to Reviews screen? | tsl-reviews_open_review_screen |
Reviews settings screen | When on, tapping a home-screen review opens the full Reviews screen instead of the underlying listing. |
You’ll still see an older Enable Reviews? flag (
listing_show_reviews) inmam-main‘s Listings group. It’s a holdover from before Reviews Manager’s content-section model, and nothing on the server reads it anymore — the content sections above are what actually drive reviews, not this flag. Leave it on if you find it already on, but don’t treat it as the master switch.
2. Decide whether reviews are auto-approved
Head to the Reviews settings screen (Mobile App Manager → Reviews) and set New reviews are inserted as (tsl-setting-reviews_automatically_approve). There are two choices, and it defaults to Pending:
- Approved — submitted reviews are published immediately, with no moderation step. Users see the “confirmed” message right away (see Step 6).
- Pending — submitted reviews are held for moderation. The user sees the “pending” message after submitting, and the review only appears once it is approved.
If you want a chance to screen reviews before they go live, choose Pending; if you’d rather they publish the moment someone hits submit, choose Approved. Either way, the two confirmation messages in Step 6 line up directly with whichever you pick.
While you’re already on this screen, it’s a good time to set the other review-capture options that live here too: Rating display (mam_reviews_rating_type — Stars or Numeric), Require login to review (mam_reviews_require_login), and Allow review photos (mam_reviews_allow_photos).
3. (Optional) Replace the default stars with custom images
Want the rating display to match your brand instead of the defaults? Set Custom Review Star Image Map (ratings_custom_star_image_map) in mam-main‘s Listings group. It maps your own images to each star rating, so custom icons replace the default stars wherever ratings appear.
This isn’t a plain text box — it’s a specialized star-image editor in the admin (field type
startext). Use it to supply the image(s) for each star level.
Prefer no stars at all? Set Hide Review stars? (listing_hide_stars) to on and the star rating disappears from reviews entirely.
These two star-display flags live in
mam-main‘s Listings group and predate Reviews Manager’s provider model. Confirm they still take effect for provider-based reviews before you promise the behavior to end clients.
4. (Optional) Multi-criteria (itemized) reviews
Sometimes one overall rating isn’t enough — maybe you want people rating a restaurant on Food, Service, and Value separately. Reviews can collect a rating per criterion for that. In the current provider model, the criteria come from the review provider itself: GeoDirectory listings expose their configured rating categories (via the GeoDirectory Review Rating Manager), and Reviews Manager renders one input per criterion automatically. There’s no comma-separated list for you to maintain in MAM for provider-supplied criteria.
mam-main‘s Listings group still exposes an older Use Review Items Format (use_review_item_format) toggle and Review Item Categories List (review_item_cats_list) comma field. Both predate the provider model, and nothing in the current reviews code path reads them anymore — multi-criteria is provider-driven now. Confirm this before documenting the comma-list approach for clients.
5. (Optional) Review row layout
- Review Layout ID (
review_layout_id, inmam-main‘s Listings group) — selects which layout template renders review rows, so the list of reviews matches your app’s visual style.
mam-mainalso exposes a Review Form (gravity_review_form) setting, a holdover that once pointed reviews at a Gravity Forms form under the older review system. Reviews Manager’s Add Review section is a native form driven by the Rating display / criteria options in Step 2–4, not Gravity Forms. Treatgravity_review_formas legacy, and check whether it still has any effect before you use it.
6. Set the review wording (screen and messages)
You’ll set the actual wording users see on that same Reviews settings screen (Mobile App Manager → Reviews), right alongside the options from Step 2:
| Setting | Variable | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews title | tsl-reviews_title_text |
Title at the top of the Reviews screen. |
| My Reviews text | tsl-my_reviews_text |
Label for the My Reviews section/button, where users see reviews they have written. |
| Confirmed review message | tsl-reviews_confirmed_message |
Shown after a user’s review is approved/published. This is what an Approved submission shows immediately. |
| Pending review message | tsl-reviews_pending_message |
Shown after submitting a review that is awaiting moderation. Only relevant when the approval mode is Pending. |
Write the confirmed and pending messages to match whatever you chose in Step 2. With approval mode set to Approved, most users will only ever see the confirmed message; with it set to Pending, they’ll see the pending message first and the confirmed message later, once the review goes live.
7. Verify in the Previewer
- Open the Previewer as a signed-in member.
- Open a listing detail screen and check that the star rating and a way to leave a review are both there.
- Submit a test review and confirm the message you see matches your approval-mode setting (confirmed vs. pending).
- If you enabled the home-screen options, confirm reviews appear there and that tapping one opens the screen you expect.
- Open My Reviews and confirm your test review is listed under the label you set.
- If you set custom star images, confirm they render in place of the default stars.
If nothing shows up at all, start with MAM Reviews Manager — confirm it’s entitled and active, and that the three review content sections are present on the listing detail screen (Step 1). Then check that the listing’s source plugin/provider actually supports reviews.
How it fits together
| Piece | Owned by | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews feature (content sections, submission flow, All Reviews screen) | mam-reviews-manager |
Provides reviews in the app; entitlement-gated. Adds the Reviews Header / Reviews / Add Review sections and the submission handler. |
| Review behavior, capture options, screen + message text | mam-reviews-manager (Reviews settings screen) |
Approval mode, rating display, require login, photos, and all the on-screen titles/messages. |
| Rating storage + aggregate ratings | Review provider (GeoDirectory, WooCommerce, or WordPress comments) | Reads and writes ratings through the native store so app and web match. |
| Reviewable listings | Source plugin (for example, mam-geodirectory) | Provides the listing content that reviews attach to. |
| A few display flags (home-screen reviews, hide stars, custom star map) | mam-main (Listings settings) |
Legacy display flags; verify they still apply to provider-based reviews. |
Related
- Plugin: mam-reviews-manager — the overview of the plugin that provides reviews, its provider model, and its hooks.
- Collect reviews and ratings on your listings — the full setup walkthrough for the review content sections and the All Reviews screen.
- Customize the My Reviews screen text and messages — a focused guide to the wording settings in Step 6.
- List a source plugin’s content in your app — getting reviewable listings into the app in the first place.
- Configure your app’s home screen — for placing reviews on the home screen.
