Alejandro Posted February 6, 2011 at 11:28 PM Share Posted February 6, 2011 at 11:28 PM We are very pleased to annouce the inmmediate availability of JReviews 2.3 BETA 2, compatible with both Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6. For Joomla 1.6, JReviews now supports the use of the new Joomla category system as well as the new ACL system allowing you to select any new access group in all JReviews access related settings. Before getting into the latest and greatest features in this version we would like to raise a few important points: 1. This is a BETA version so DO NOT INSTALL ON YOUR PRODUCTION SITE. It is meant for testing purposes only. Since it's a beta we are only making this version available via download from the client area to prevent users from inadvertently upgrading their production sites. 2. How to upgrade a test site? Uninstall both s2framework and JReviews components and install the new versions. Also upgrade all modules by uninstalling them and installing the ones included in the packages. If your upgrades package expired you won't be able to download the beta unless you extend your upgrades for 12 months in the client area. 3. As with every major release that has important new features, this version has many theme changes to add compatibility for those features. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE ANY FILE OVERRIDES with the beta because there's a really high probability that you will have problems. Save us the support time and rename your overrides to something else if you are upgrading a test site. We also suggest you wait until a more stable version is released before making any customizations to this version because there are probably going to be more changes as bugs are fixed and some additional minor features added. 4. A trial version of 2.3 will become available only after the 2.3 stable version is released. Here is the list of the most important new features and changes in this version: Related fields or control fields: if you don't know what this means please refer to the sneak preview Video on Related Fields in JReviews we posted in December. Improved listing comparison UI: listings grouped in tabs based on listing type and a a listing scroller is activated when many listings are added for comparison. Checkout the Video on the Listing Comparison Feature of JReviews AutoComplete UI for select lists: this is the surprise field related feature we had announced before - we've put together a short Video on the AutoComplete UI for Fields in JReviews so you can see what this means and how it even works with related fields! Slideshow mode for modules: available in listings, reviews and favorites modules. Vertical scrolling is also possible now. Banner field: ever wanted to have a way to show a banner in all your listings without having to edit the theme fields or every listing? The banner field is a non-input field which allows you to display text, affiliate banners, Google Adsense ads or even publish a Joomla module, via the loadposition tag, inside JReviews listings. Multiple display options for field descriptions: tooltip, above or below the field input. Change the field type of existing fields: Some restrictions apply because the change is only possible between fields that have the same database column type. For example if you have a checkbox or radio field you'd like to convert to a list to use the AutoComplete UI this can be easily done. If you want to convert between text fields (text, website, email) it's also possible. Integrated the maps code for GeoMaps into the JReviews theme: there are new map settings in the listing type setup and GeoMaps configuration. Now you can easily enable/disable maps for each listing type without having to deal with theme suffixes or having to modify the themes at all. New fallback theme setting: if you want to develop your own theme and then use that as the basis for other theme variations you can do that instead of always having to use the "default" theme as the fallback. Meta description and keyword parameters for menus: now you can add these meta tags to all JReviews menu-based pages. Social sharing buttons for Twiter and FB in detail pages: settings under the Community tab. New thumbnail mode setting for lists: choose between scaled or cropped images. Refactored reviewer rank code: this will bring significant performance improvement in sites with large number of reviews: ranks are now pre-calculated and refreshed periodically using a new setting in the reviews tab. New setting to display images in directory pages:: the setting applies to section (J15) and top level category (J16) images in the directory layout. Other important changes: Xajax no longer used anywhere in JReviews. Upgraded to jQuery 1.5 and jQuery UI 1.8.9. Changed the tooltips in forms to a much nicer plugin. Upgraded the Thumbnailer class. Cropped images are much better now, capturing a larger part of the original image. Removed js/css compression feature - too many problems. Link to comment
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