How to Change the Rating Stars in SharePoint 2010

I’m a real fan of the new rating system in lists and document libraries. However, what if I don’t want stars? Or, what if the blue doesn’t match my company branding? I’ll show you how to change the stars to anything you would like, in this case, smiley faces!

This is applied at the site collection level and the change will be inherited by all sub-sites.

Preparation:

What images you’ll need: (must be 16×16 pixels)

• Empty – an image of your icon as it appears unrated (ex. the white star)
• New – an image of your icon that will be used as users hover over the ratings (ex. the yellow star)
• Half – an image of your icon that will be used to represent half ratings (ex. the half blue star)
• Rated – an image of your icon as it will appear rated by others (ex. the blue star)

Copy the new and empty icon images to the “14 hive” images folder. In most installations, this will be found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES. The other two will be used to create the ratings strip described next.

Okay, so we need two images that match the concept of the Ratings.png and Ratingsrtl.png images found in the 14 hive’s images folder:

 ß Ratings.png

 ß Ratingsrtl.png

Use your favorite graphics editor (I highly recommend Paint.Net – it’s free and awesome!):

Copy the Ratings.png and Ratingsrtl.png from the images folder, open them up and paste over the stars with your icon, substituting them as noted below:

• Yellow star = New icon
• White star = Empty icon
• Blue star = Rated icon
• Half blue star = Half icon

The results from the use of smiley faces:

 ß Smileys.png

 ß Smileysrtl.png

Save these two new images to the images folder in the 14 hive and you are ready to begin the steps! (Yes, that was just the beginning, but the hard part is over.)

Process:

Assuming you have already enabled ratings within a library or list, this is what the default looks like:

Click here on how to enable ratings

Launch SharePoint Designer 2010 and open the site collection where you would like to change the rating icons, and then click on Site Options within the ribbon UI:

On the Parameters tab, highlight and click Modify for ratings_emptyiconurl to change the image filename and location to the empty icon in the images folder:

Note: use /_layouts/Images/yourfilename.gif to represent the folder location and filename of your icon.

Repeat the step above for the remaining ratings parameters:

• ratings_newratingiconurl = new icon image
• ratings_imagestripurl = icon range image (ex. Smileys.png)
• ratings_imagestriprtlurl = icon range right-to-left image (ex. Smileysrtl.png)

Click Apply on the Site Options window after making all of the URL changes, close SPD 2010 and then perform an IISReset. Go back to your list or library and you should now have smiley faces instead of stars!

You might see the new and empty icons working right after you apply the changes, but I did not get the full functionality until I did an iisreset.