Hi Kurtisb

It's a topic I've been wanting to look into myself so I had a poke around wobbly wobbly wobbly land and came up with this...

freereviewscript.com

It's free and it's written in the cakephp framework of all things.
That'd be something to get your teeth into.
Not something I've played with until now.

It lets you create reviews and allows user comments and ratings.

It's the full catastrophe with Page Editor, Categories, Reviews, members etc all created in the admin section. So it's like a cut down, purpose built Wordpress kind of thing.

Templating is still an unknown issue at this time, only having just installed it on my local host, the default isn't too bad and you can change the images on the page in the Admin.

Installation is pretty simple...

There is "forum support" but while there are a few recent posts from users, it appears the authors have been lost in action for a lil while. So I'm not sure how that bodes, But it appears that most users are happy with it.

There is a demo site at Demo - FreeReviewScript.com - Home which basically is how it comes out of the box minus the header graphics and the color scheme has been changed.

It's not too bad, once you get a few pages setup...

So I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but it'd get you up and running while you look at other options.

And if you do want to delve into PHP, getting your feet wet with an MVC Framework is not a bad way to go. Be prepared to do some reading and messing around though!

Gee this has nearly turned into a review...

You can always go down the path as suggested by Jarret and get the appropriate plugins etc..

Anyone else come across any other review based scripts,plugins etc?

So this has only given you more options to choose from.

I might try tossing it up on one of my poor neglected review sites and see how it flies. But that won't be anytime soon.

Cheers
Tim