Advanced search with Drupal (Views and CCK)

Have you looked at the fivestar module? You could use that to allow users to vote on the exercises, assuming the exercises are nodes. At the least, the votingapi should be used as the basis of any vote-related feedback, I'd think.

It took much longer than it should have, but I finally figured out how to do this. I may release a module on the Drupal site later on, but in case anyone else has this same problem, this was the solution I came to.

Create a module and use hook_form_alter() to modify the form. I already had a module I was using to customize the advanced search, so I put it in there. I won't get into the detail of building your own module - you can find a simple tutorial for that, and you only need to define this one function.

/**
 * Implementation of hook_form_alter().
 * Remove 'category:x,y,z' from the keyword textbox and select them in the taxonomy terms list
 */
function modulename_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id) {
    // Advanced node search form
    if ($form_id == 'search_form' && $form['module']['#value'] == 'node' && user_access('use advanced search')) {
        // Remove category:x,y,z from the keyword box
        $searchPhrase = $form['basic']['inline']['keys']['#default_value'];
        if(!empty($searchPhrase) && strpos($searchPhrase, 'category:') !== false) {
            $searchWords = explode(' ', $form['basic']['inline']['keys']['#default_value']);
            foreach($searchWords as $index=>$word) {
                if(strpos($word, 'category:') === 0) {
                    // Use the value to set the default on the taxonomy search
                    $word = substr($word, strlen('category:'));
                    $form['advanced']['category']['#default_value'] = explode(',', $word);
                    // Remove it from the keyword textbox
                    unset($searchWords[$index]);
                }
            }

            // Re-set the default value for the text box without the category: part
            $form['basic']['inline']['keys']['#default_value'] = implode(' ', $searchWords);
        }
    }
}