Custom Radio Buttons

Today I thought about a project I had in mind for some time, it has to do with ratings of different contents and the first thing I thought about was: What's the easiest or best way to create a rating form with custom buttons (stars, hearts, whatever).

A few years ago I had to do this once and I remember doing it with an image and background-position but as of today I really love pseudo elements and "Look-Ma-No-Image!". However I decided to use Icon Fonts this time and play around a bit with them. My HTML Markup is very simple:

  <input type="radio" data-rate="1" name="rating" class="rating--star" />
  <input type="radio" data-rate="2" name="rating" class="rating--star" />
  <input type="radio" data-rate="3" name="rating" class="rating--star" />
  <input type="radio" data-rate="4" name="rating" class="rating--star" />
  <input type="radio" data-rate="5" name="rating" class="rating--star" />

That's it: A group of radio inputs representing a rating system with 1-5 possible choices. The CSS part is a little bit trickier (note that I'm using Sass with SCSS Syntax!)

.rating--star {
  color:#ff7711;
  &:before {
    content:"\2605";
    font-size:2em;
    font-family:entypo, sans-serif;
  }

  &:checked ~ :before {
    content:"\2606";
  }

  &:focus {
    outline:0;
  }
}

A small piece of code, yet it can seem complicated. I'll break it down a bit.

.rating--star {
  color:#ff7711;

  @include appearance(none);

  &:before {
    content:"\2605";
    font-size:2em;
    font-family:entypo, sans-serif;
  }

The first part represents the class itself and the :before pseudo element that holds the icon (in this case a Star from the entypo icon font served via We Love Icon Fonts), I set the color on the element directly because the :before and :checked ~ :before are using the same color. appearance:none; removes the User Agent style from the input element or, in other words, "hides" the element.

 &:checked ~ :before {
    content:"\2606";
  }

The next line says "when the input is :checked change the properties of :before". So when it is checked I want the filled Star to show up ("\2606"). Seems logical? It's not. \2606 is the empty star. So the &:checked ~ :before pseudo holds the icon that should be included if the button is not checked and the :before holds the checked (in this case filled) icon. This is because :checked ~ :before selects every element that is preceded of the :checked element. This comes handy because this also means all inputs display a filled star if we check the last star (and that's exactly what we want).

A live demo can be found on CodePen.