One of my clients needs a star rating system for his product reviews. There is an old module for that: FiveStar. And that's fine because he's still running Drupal 7. But he has expressed ambitions to migrate to Drupal 8 and the latest version of FiveStar for Drupal 8 is still in alpha.

The easy solution would be not to worry and install one more module on his website. But wait a minute, in the module admin page Module Filter says: «311 of 593». Yikes! Also, FiveStar was created 14 years ago for solving a specific use case: letting members of a community rate content while browsing a website (i.e. when content is displayed in Default/Full content view mode).

In the present use case, a customer is invited to edit a node linked to the product he recently purchased. That's a much simpler use case, one that does not require a very sophisticated UI, in a node edit form, a simple select with options 1 to 5 stars will do just fine. Where we want this system to shine is in how it displays the rating, not in how it lets users set the rating.

Finally, if a simple and static home-made system can be produced then migrating it to Drupal 8 will be trivial.