FW Gallery – Documentation

The Vote & Rating addon adds an interactive star rating system to your gallery files. Visitors can score individual images, and galleries can surface the most popular content by sorting files based on accumulated ratings.

Use Cases

• Photo contests — let visitors vote for their favourite images and rank results by score.
• Community curation — automatically promote the highest-rated files to the top of gallery listings.
• Visitor engagement — interactive rating encourages participation and increases time spent on the page.

How It Works

Once active, a rating widget appears on file grid items and on single file detail pages. Visitors click to submit a score, and the widget updates to reflect the current average. Files can then be sorted by rating — highest-rated first — on any gallery page. FW Gallery modules such as the latest files module and the carousel module can also filter or order results by vote count.

Registered users have their votes tied to their Joomla account, preventing duplicate submissions. Guest voting relies on cookies or IP address to limit repeat votes when the guest option is enabled.

Settings

Configure the addon from Settings → Add-ons → Vote inside FW Gallery.

• Allow guest voting — when enabled, non-logged-in visitors can submit ratings. Disabled by default, restricting voting to registered users only.
• Rating display style — controls the visual appearance of the rating control. Options include stars, thumbs, numeric, and similar styles.
• Show vote count — displays the total number of votes a file has received alongside the rating widget.
• Show average rating — displays the calculated average score for each file.

Notes

• Vote data (vote count and vote sum) is stored directly in the gallery file records. Existing rating data is preserved in the database even if the addon is later deactivated — ratings simply stop appearing on the frontend.

To install this addon, open the Add-ons panel inside FW Gallery. See Getting Started → Add-ons for details on free addons, paid addons, and site verification.