jReviews Support Forum

I'm currently using JR as a trial. I want to start out by saying this is by far the most top-notch extension in Joomla I've seen. Believe it or not, I think the admin interface may be easier to use than the joomla back end itself.

Before I purchase, I have a few questions:

1) My review system is going to have thousands of cities, each with the same categories (such as restaurants, bars, pubs, etc). What is the best way to organize this using jR and joomla? From my understanding, if I make the cities the sections, then I'll have to recreate the categories for each city I create (doing so in the back end). Is there another way around this?

2) Moreover, let's say on the home page I have a "restaurant tab." When someone clicks on this tab, I want them to be able to type in their city into a search bar, and then the top-rated restraunts in their city pops up. Is this possible?

3) How easy is it to modify jReviews? For example, some things I want to modify:

• Change stars rating system to A to F
• Make the overall rating itself a category for users to rate, not one that is averaged out by the criteria
• Other various changes to the layout of the reviews
• Give the ability to filter results by "top-rated" for each criteria

Thank you for the help,
rem

Thanks!

It's best to use a custom field for the categories and take advantage of the fields module and click2search functionality to allow users to filter by category. Then you use the same field for all cities.

You can use the advanced search module to let users pick a city. Currently search is not done on category names, so unless the city is repeated in content itself it wouldn't be found. You can set the default sorting in the configuration by rating.


Entirely depends on your coding skills ;)

You just need to change the function that generates the rating dropdown. (jreviews.common.php, selectSlider). Everything is changing in jReviews 2.0.

You need to use a custom field for this, add the rating options individually. However, the average will still be calculated and it's the one  used for sorting etc. You can get rid of it from the display side of things, but the functionality related to that average remains.

Check the template forum. Again this will change in jReviews 2.0 providing greater flexibility.

Can't be done.

Alejandro: Thank you for the reply!

So, from what I understand:

• My cities should be sections
  
• I should create a custom field for each part (e.g. restaurants, bars, pubs, etc.). This should be done in the fields manager
• What do I create as actual categories then? Or should the cities be categories?

I played around with custom fields part (and virtual categories) for a few hours today. It appears to be complex. Besides the video tutorial, is there an online guide or forum post which goes over all of it's many functions in detail?

Can't be done no matter how much I edit the code, or can't be done with the ability to update jReviews? Speaking of, what can I change code-wise and still be able to easily update when new updates come out?

Thank you again for the help :)

Another example, let's say I have "Services" as a category and "lawyers" as a sub category. Of course, it's very important to organize this by city (just like restaurants).

Would it be best to have services as the section, lawyers as the category and the city as a "virtual category" - e.g. a custom field?

Is it easy to see all the reviews and content in that custom field (i.e. that city) if I do it this way?

What I suggested before was to have cities as the categories within a single section and then use custom fields to tag each listing across multiple subcategories. Each custom field would represent a different subcategory.

You can use a single field subcategory and add all the possible options for that field. THere's no detailed documentation, but you can login to the demo administration and see how it's done there where they are used for each category.

You need to play with it a bit to see what you end up liking best.

I'll play around with it a little more. There are a lot of features. Thank you for the help.

As for the filtering by criteria: It can't be done no matter how much I edit the code, or can't be done with the ability to update jReviews? Speaking of, what can I change code-wise and still be able to easily update when new updates come out?

Anything is possible if you edit the code, but this is one of the things that would require more work to implement. As to how much you can edit the code? Once you change anything, it's really up to you to keep track of the changes for future updates. With the upcoming jReviews 2.0, the file structure is completely different and now there are a lot more files! It makes it easier to maintain if you change something because you can make notes of the individual files you changed.