Stars light up when mouse hovers
There's a brilliant tutorial on the web for designing a 5 star rating system: http://rog.ie/blog/css-star-rater. It's purely CSS so no need for Javascripting.
Page doesn't have to be reloaded when a star is clicked (not really needed)
Ajax is your friend, what I did was to have a submitRating() function used Ajax to transmit my rating (1/5) to the server, the server stores the rating (and assigns the user that gave the rating) and recalculates the new average rating and submit the results back in JSON format.
Some sort of average shown beside the stars
Easy. Write a SQL script that, based on the product id, takes the sum of the average rating (i.e. 1/5 + 2/5 + 4/5, etc), divide it(sum) by the total amount of ratings and multiplies it by 100. Return the value back to the server, and from the server back to the client.
Rating has to be stored somewhere in a MySQL database (Is this a good idea?)
I am using MySQL for this and it works like a charm....Any DB systems is fine.
