What next for JReviews?

[Alejandro]

We wanted to take a little time to provide an update on things we are working on and things that are high on our list for future development. As everyone knows, a Joomla 1.6 RC version is around the corner, or at least it appears to be. As usual we want JReviews users to be able to move forward so we undertook a major effort to refactor the JReviews code to be able to work natively in both J1.5 and J1.6 with a single JReviews version.

 

We have been working on this new J1.5/1.6 compatible version for a couple of months now and we have made great progress. Of course this wouldn't be complete unless we also refactored the GeoMaps and PaidListings add-ons so they are also compatible with J1.6.

 

I want to emphasize again that this has been a very big undertaking, mostly because JReviews extends the Joomla article system instead of duplicating it. That meant we had to rewrite a big part of the code to be able to use the new category and access control systems. We also removed all the legacy code that used xajax in the administration and re-wrote the theme engine to manage theme suffixes.

 

When this version of JReviews is released, most likely as v2.3, it will have the same features as the current version, but will be released as beta due to the number of changes. This is the version that will be updated with new features going forward because we don't want to maintain two different versions of JReviews.

 

We don't have a date for the release of v2.3. Initially it will only be available via download, for users with valid upgrade packages, so beta testers can start using it on development sites in both J1.5 and J1.6 and provide feedback.

 

In terms of development of new features there are two that are top priority. We had announced them for JReviews v3, just like configuration overrides which are already available, but we will also be including them in v2.x.

 

The first is chained or related fields and the second is media uploads. As anyone who has been using JReviews for a while knows when we implement something it has to be done correctly. We try to avoid creating quick patches that aren't flexible or good for the long term. This means that features can and will take longer to develop if done correctly which is what we are trying to do with these two features. In addition to these we will also develop a new theme that will be a replacement of the current default theme. It will be tableless, easier to customize and it will also serve as a starting point for developing a mobile theme.

 

That's all for now. We'll keep you posted!