New release: JReviews 4.6.2 & JReviews 5 Beta 1

A new round of updates is now available for JReviews and several addons with bug fixes, and also some important changes and performance improvements. Also available is JReviews v5 Beta 1, which is a big milestone! I am looking forward to seeing more people enjoying the experience of the beautiful new admin dashboard.

JReviews v5 Beta 1 Launch

We are very excited about this release as v5 gets closer to a stable release. The ability to switch to the legacy dashboard which was kept in the alpha versions has now been removed from JReviews and all addons leading to a 10% reduction in the size of the JReviews package. Going forward, one dashboard instead of two is also going to be easier to maintain.

Performance Improvements

Recently a client brought up an issue with a custom list page that had about 50 listings per page, and that page was taking over 9 seconds to load. It turns out the issue was due to thumbnail images being generated and uploaded to Amazon S3 on every page load. This was happening for images found in the listing summary, because the listings didn't have their own separate JReviews-uploaded images. And since there were many of these, it was taking a real toll on loading time. After applying the fix to store summary thumbnail images locally, the same page was now loading in about 150 milliseconds!

Another client uses MightSites in their Joomla site to share the user database across separate websites and this was breaking some functionality in JReviews. We added some basic support for MightSites, similar to the support that is included for WordPress multi-sites. This is implemented through a separate database connection for the users database. While working on this we realized that the separate connection was being used even for non-multisite sites, so fixing this means there's always just one database connection used by default.

New Theme Brand Selector

Since most clients used different templates for their sites, with different approaches to CSS, it's not easy to blend 3rd party solutions into every available template. JReviews has used it's own CSS since the very first version and for some time is now using Tailwind CSS which really speeds up the design work and reduces the size of the stylesheets used by JReviews.

New in JReviews 5 is the ability to select your brand color so it's easy to match your site's brand. In JReviews the brand color is used in form inputs, primary and secondary buttons and in the new Dashboard Addon release, it's also being used for the listing analytics graphs. In the image below, link colors come from the site template and button and graphs from JReviews just by selecting the matching brand color.

In addition to the brand color, there's a new page available in the Support section in the JReviews dashboard called Theme Elements where you can preview all the different elements (buttons, badges, form inputs, alerts and notifications) used by JReviews in the newer templates used by addons like MyLists, Dashboard and EventsCalendar. You can also preview how the elements appear in both light and dark modes. For now all other templates continue to work just like in JReviews 4

Optimized API Requests in Dashboard Addon

Not familiar with the Dashboard Addon? It's listings analytics for your site users so they can view listing traffic and custom event statistics over time.

The addon doesn't reinvent the wheel to capture site traffic and events. Instead it relies on 3rd party services, with an emphasis on Fathom Analytics, a privacy-first, user-friendly and GDPR compliant analytics solution. You can also use Google Analytics v4, but the setup is complex, and as of now it takes about 24 hours for Google to make traffic data available to the Google Analytics Data API.

The addon was completely overhauled to optimize and lower API request usage. We are using longer cache times and when a request fails listing owners will be informed, and the previously available data will be shown until the next successful request. If you are running into rate-limiting issues, you can contact the Fathom team to request an increase in the rate limit. They've already been kind enough to do this for some clients.

Fixed Everywhere Addon EasySocial Groups Integration

Not familiar with the Everywhere Addon? It's a review powerhouse for your site. You get to use the most powerful review solution available not only for your directory listings, but also with other solutions like EasySocial profiles, groups and events in Joomla and BuddyBoss and PeepSo profiles, and WooCommerce products in WordPress. There are more integrations available and listed in the documentation.

The EasySocial Groups integration broke at some point after an EasySocial update and it was only recently reported. This is now fixed!

Changelogs

This is just a short of fixes, changes and improvements in these releases. You can read the complete list in our changelog. We'll start providing detailed changelogs for JReviews 5 once it's out, or closer to being out, of beta.