jReviews :: Customer support forum

http://www.classicamiga.com

The site is dedicated to the Commodore Amiga computer from the 80's and 90's and jReviews is being used for the Games section, as well as the Best of the Demo Scene section found within the Demo section.  Our staff members have only been helping me add entries into the games section for about a week now but already we have over 1000 games in the database and this is about to grow to over 4000 within the next few weeks.

To showcase pages on the site using jReviews that have all of their content in place take a look at the following pages:

Superfrog http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97&Itemid=96

Rick Dangerous http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=87&Itemid=96

Pinball Fantasies http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=86

Pinball Illusions http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=84&Itemid=86

jReviews  is also going to be used in the near future for some other sections of the site currently in development including a catalogue of Amiga hardware, and an archive of Amiga magazines.

Strange.  It's working perfectly and many regular members, as well as guests (over 200) have been on the site in the last day.

I know what could cause that error and it's not directly related to my site.  The site uses a visitor tracking component called GeoCommunity to log the location of visits on a google map.  Sometimes a persons IP address cannot be retrieved from the reference server being used to find the location based on a visitors IP address.  If this happens it should just timeout, give up and continue loading the site, but on very rare occassions it can throw up the error you saw.  This was a problem during beta testing of the component but was meant to be fixed and I, as well as the rest of the site's staff members haven't managed to get the error to happen again since it was meant to be fixed.

Try accessing the site again and see if the same happens.  It shouldn't but I would like to know if it does as this means there is still a bug in the IP collection bot.

In the template I split the two normal Joomla article text areas so the first is at the top and called Description and Comments, and the second one is at the bottom and called Media.

To make the images with the lightbox feature work in the media gallery I just use html for each image and add the rel="lightbox" property to the A href tag.

An example is as follows from the page you linked to:


This is simplified slightly by adding the thumbnail images to the page using WYSIWYG Pro editors add image feature that automatically creates thumbnails for all images on the site.  I insert these thumbnails in the media section and link them to the larger versions of the images, and then just edit the html and add the rel property to activate the lightbox feature. 

Another useful feature of lightbox I use is to add a gallery tag such as rel="lightbox[media]" to link them all together in the large view.

The other sections are each a different jReviews custom field group.   And in the template structure in the com_content.html template file you just need to code the template to layout the custom field groups and custom fields by calling their field database names in the template and using html to construct the look of the page.

I'm using quite a few other components, modules and mambots on the site, but for the actual jReviews sections of the site  the other main one I'm using is JomComment.  This works perfectly with jReviews as it using the standard Joomla article structure so you have the ability to add the same JomComment commenting system to the bottom of all of your jReviews entries.  I find this is great as visitors and members can use this to leave small comments for each entry without needing to submit a full review, especially if one has already been written.

The most powerful thing I like about jReviews itself is how customisable it is.  To get the most from it, spending some time working and experimenting with the templates really does open jReviews up to anything you like.  And the ability to add as many categories and fields to each entry again opens this component up to a lot of uses and possibilities.  With Joomla and jReviews installed you could practically build any type of directory or review style site with the minimum of fuss or hassle.  This is definitely the best system I have encountered to date.

As for the rest of the site, I am using Community Builder plus a lot of other components, modules and CB plugins that all work well together, such as the uddeIM PM system and Mamblog.  In addition I'm also using Phil Taylor's Knowledgebase for FAQs and Tutorials on the site, Marketplace from Joomster, Docman, Contacts XTD, Bookmarks (for web links), Acajoom (for newsletters), Easybook (for a guestbook), eXit-poll (for better site polls), Zoom Media Gallery (for the site image gallery), and Mylinks for a site based favourites system.

I am also currently using two other components called DCSFlashGames and jAwards, but both of these are about to be removed from my site as the site's vB forum is now running mods that do the same things but much better.

Always great to see another Amiga fan enjoying the site.