SharePoint 2010: How to change rating icons

English: Sometimes you may received a request to change rating icons, from a normal star to a love icon. So, how would you do it? Figure 1. Original rating icons Figure 2. Modified love rating icons 1. Find and prepare rating icons.  In this case I will need to prepare 4 styles rating icons

Title

Sample

Size

a. Empty Rating

16x16

b. Selected Rating

16x16

c. Rating Overlay

448x16

d. Rating Overlay RightToLeft

448x16

  2. Save the new icons under 14 hive\Images. 3. Create script to modify SPWeb property bag. To ease our job, I will use PowerShell script as follows,

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.SharePoint”) > $null **$spSite = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("**http://win2k8”); $spWeb = $spSite.OpenWeb(); $spWeb.Properties[“Ratings_NewRatingIconUrl”] = “/_layouts/Images/love_RatingsNew.png”; $spWeb.Properties[“Ratings_EmptyIconUrl”] = “/_layouts/Images/love_RatingsEmpty.png”; $spWeb.Properties[“Ratings_ImageStripUrl”] = “/_layouts/Images/love_Ratings.png”; $spWeb.Properties[“Ratings_ImageStripRtlUrl”] = “/_layouts/Images/love_Ratingsrtl.png”; $spWeb.Properties.Update(); $spWeb.Dispose(); $spSite.Dispose(); iisreset

  4. Voila ! And you can refresh your browser to see the changes. 5. Finally you can distribute your solution into a solutions package with feature activation events to register/un-register custom rating images.