A friend of mine needed a good rating script for a project he’s working on. When he linked me to this star rating widget, I didn’t have very high expectations, but after seeing the widget and its implementation I’m actually quite impressed.  (The only drawback is that it requires jQuery UI and can’t be implemented as a stand-alone plugin.)

One thing that makes jQuery plugins truly awesome is their ability to be completely unobtrusive (read: “degrade gracefully”).  In this case, the Star Rating widget makes use of either a group of radio controls or a dropdown menu which get replaced before the page loads.  When you submit the form, the values are carried over just as you would normally expect.  Simple.

Of course, the plugin sports all the features you could possible want for a simple rating widget.  If you’ve been looking for a jQuery UI-based rating widget, you’ll be more than happy with this one.  It would be nice, however, to have a version of this plugin that doesn’t have the jQuery UI dependency.  I’ve got nothing against jQuery UI, but it’s rather heavy if all you’re using it for is a simple rating widget.