rugbyUNITED

rugbyUNITED.com is a social network and news community for rugby players and fans worldwide. The site allows users to share news articles and match reports from their local regions, join groups, discuss issues on forums, share photos, and have user profiles with private messaging. The site employs the best collection of Joomla! extensions, including jReviews, Jomsocial, Jomcomment, Kunena, Eventlist, and HWDvideoshare.

What were the site requirements?

The site needed to employ a very simple process for users to upload their own local news, attach pictures, and categorize their items into a complex searchable and sortable vertical and horizontal hierarchy. The site needed to accomplish all of this without sacrificing design or security and not requiring extra administrator work verifying and editing items. The final requirement was a tight integration with the community features of Jomsocial and Jomcomment.

Why was JReviews chosen?

JReviews was initially used because of it's ability to add additional horizontal categorization functionality (virtual categories) to the standard vertical hierarchy of joomla (sections and categories). It shortly became apparent that it's advanced templating capabilities and override functionality make it a very extensible solution. The final piece of the puzzle is it's out-of-the-box integration with Jomsocial.

How is JReviews being used on the site?

JReviews is being used to allow our users, all of whom are members of individual athletic teams, to post their own news stories and photos in a specific category and section. However, it also allows them to tag each article with a number of virtual categories. These virtual categories are important because a reader might be interested in a specific category (college news), as well as all news in their region across multiple categories (Northwest college news, Northwest high school news, Northwest youth news, etc.). These virtual categories span the traditional Joomla categories and allow for click-to-search functionality by region, team, division, and other important features of the news articles. A number of custom templates for articles and modules were also built to allow for a more traditional news website layout with leading articles and links to additional articles in each category, all on one page. JReviews is also tightly integrated with Jomsocial, showing author avatars with links to their profiles on articles, lists of users' articles on their profiles, and notifications in the Jomsocial activity feed any time a user posts or edits an article.

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

The key advantages to jReviews are easy to list because it has few rivals among Joomla! extensions. The support is first class, the template code is transparent enough for even rookies to understand, and both the backend and frontend user interfaces are exceedingly powerful while remaining easy to understand for all site users. It is an abolutely critical component and does its job smoothly.