If you look at how most solutions for WordPress and Joomla implement user reviews, it's really quite obvious they seriously lack pizazz! They are dull and non-exciting at all. With the Everywhere Add-on you get to to implement JReviews' fantastic user review functionality in other solutions.
Overview
The add-on offers a comprehensive integration of review features:
- Multiple rating criteria
- Review custom fields
- Review moderation
- Review search
- Photos, videos, attachments, and audio uploads for reviews
- Owner replies to reviews
- Review helpfulness voting
- Review reporting
- Email notifications
And, unlike most single-site review solutions out there, which are superficial in nature, the Everywhere Add-on, goes even further:
- The listings and reviews shortcodes, and Joomla modules and WordPress widgets also work with the integrated solutions
- When you display a list of most recent reviews, it will include core reviews, but also reviews submitted for integrated solutions.
- When using community integrations, all review related activity is also included in activity streams, can earn points, etc.
Available Integrations
The following integrations are currently available out of the box.
Joomla
-
EasySocial: profiles, events, and groups
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JomSocial: profiles
-
Community Builder: prrofiles
-
Jomres: properties
-
K2: articles
Due to the depth of the integrations with the JReviews core, creating new integrations is not trivial. The complexity will vary depending on the product that's being integrated and the options it provides for injecting data at different points in the execution of the code.
If you are interested in a new integration, get in touch to see if there's an opportunity to work together.
Getting Started
In addition to installing the add-on, make sure you've also installed one of the supported solutions mentioned above.
For Joomla integrations, it's necessary to install separate apps or plugins for each solution. You'll find these inside the 3rd_party_jreviews_apps_plugins.zip
download package in the client area. Look for the packages inside the plugins_everywhere_addon
folder. At this time, the ones that require this are:
- CommunityBuilder - install directly within CB
- EasySocial - install directly within EasySocial
- Jomres - install directly within Jomres
- JomSocial - install via Joomla plugins manager
- K2 - install via Joomla plugins manager
Make sure you install the needed app or plugin first.
With that out of the way, lets get started:
-
Create one or more Listing Types for the integration
You can re-use existing listing types if you are already using JReviews for regular content. However, if you are starting new, or depending on your specific use-case, create separate listing types with the appropriate rating criteria and set of review custom fields.
As part of this process you should of course create any new review field groups and custom fields to associate them with your listing types. If you need a refresher, check the Initial Setup
-
Setup categories for your integration
In the add-on administration, find the Select Extension
dropdown in the menu toolbar, select the solution you are going to setup, then click Setup New
. This will show a dialog allowing you to select one listing type, and the categories that you want to associate with this listing type.
It is posisble to use different listing types for different categories, so if that's what you want to do, you need to save, then repeat the process by selecting a new listing type and categories.
Some of the integrations allow choosing a default listing type that will be used for all categories if one is not specifically selected.
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Submit your first review
Head over to the detail
page for your integrated solution (user profile, event page, product page, ...) and you should see the review form at the bottom.
You can adjust access settings at the listing type level to control the permissions for submitting reviews, moderation settings, and more.
The integration extends to shortcodes, modules and widgets. A listing
is the equivalent of the main page for the product that you are integrating. So when adding reviews to user profiles, the profile is the listing. For events, the event is the listing, and so on. This means that you can use the JReviews listings module/widget to show a list of entries for your integration, just like you can do for regular content. For example, with profile integrations, you can use the listings shortcode, module/widget to show:
- Top rated users
- Most reviewed users
- Most recent users
This will include the user's avatar, as well as rating information.
To do this, it is necessary to change the Everywhere Extension
setting in module/widgets or set the attribute in shortcodes.
To find out what the extension
attribute value is for a particular integration, you can find it in the JReviews administration, under Browse → Reviews
. There's a blue badge for each review, identifying the right extension. For regular content it's com_content
, for EasySocial, it's com_easysocial
, for PeepSo it's com_peepso
, and so on.
There is a limitation for using these features with 3rd party integrations and that's category filtering. The ability to filter a list of listings or reviews by category only works for the native JReviews com_content
extension.