Astia is a unique, international not-for-profit organization. Astia provides innovative programs that ensure companies gain access to capital, achieve and sustain high-growth, and develop the executive leadership of the founding team.

What were the site requirements?

A major requirement of the site was to serve as a directory for the companies and individuals for the Silicon Valley start-up community. A challenge was to figure out how to selectively search any content items based on search criteria, but to make the search results feel like part of the normal site content. For example, a company such as Microsoft might be both a sponsor of the program and a sponsor of a specific event: rather than creating multiple content items, we wanted to dynamically generate the list of sponsors based on metadata. With Joomla, this is impossible, because it's not possible to add detailed metadata to content items.

How is JReviews being used on the site?

With JReviews, we were able to add "hidden" fields to normal content items that we could then use to search and display the related content items. So, in the example above, we had a basic category for "Companies". With JReviews, we created a field called "Sponsorships". For each company, we could then check-off all of the events that the company sponsored. Then, we simply created a module for each event, and "tuned" the module to only show content items with a specific event checked.

Additionally, because we wanted the site to be self-service for the client, we ended up using JReviews for everything: news items (so we could include a web link and source), a resource directory… even user profiles, so that members could search for people with special skill sets!

It's worth noting that we didn't use reviews anywhere in the site!

What are the key advantages of using JReviews for your website or business?

The one-size-fits-all flexibility of JReviews. It has been great for us – and REALLY great for our clients – to have a single system for managing all the major content types in their site. And because there is good front-end editing and content addition capabilities, our clients seldom have to go into the administration, which is how we like it.