Updates available for JReviews and JReviews Express and Add-ons

[Alejandro]

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of new versions for JReviews, GeoMaps, PaidListings and JReviews Express. There are many changes and bug fixes, and also a few additions. Below the highlights of these releases. The updates are available via remote updates in the JReviews admin and for download in the client area. JReviews Express is only available in the client area. For upgrade information please refer to the documentation: http://docs.reviewsforjoomla.com/How_to_upgrade_JReviews

 

We have worked hard to bring some important performance improvements by optimizing many of the queries both by re-writing them and also by adding new table table indexes. These improvements are across the board, but should be especially noticeable for sites with J1.6 and J1.7 that have lots of categories. We also added a new session cache to avoid performing count queries on paginated lists every time a new page is loaded. We may extend the use of this session cache to other areas in the future.

 

There are several SEO improvements as well in this version. We've incorporated the use of rel "prev" and "next" meta tags which are now recognized by Google when indexing pages. They let Google know that all pages in a list are really part of the same page and helps with the common issue of duplicate pages for paginated lists. To incorporate this change we had to make changes to listings_{layout}.thtml and listings_header.thtml theme files. Other SEO improvements include more optimized urls with less parameters for many of the JReviews pages. We added a new setting, enabled by default, to hide the "results per page" list that appears in paginated lists because this lists generates a great number of additional, duplicate, pages that search engines can index. If you need this list you can enable it in the configuration, general tab. Finally a new setting called "Joomla Style urls" is also available in the configuration, general tab and uses the &key=value format for url parameters instead of JReviews' native /key:value/ format. This allows you to use tools like Google Analytics for tracking searches and also improves core sef urls for paginated lists because the /menu/ segment is no longer required. Remember, this new setting is disabled by default so you need to enable it.

 

We have developed a Migration Add-on to help automate some of the tasks required to migrate your site from J1.5 to J1.7. We also put together an article and a video tutorial to make the process easier. Take a look here:

 

http://docs.reviewsforjoomla.com/How_to_migrate_JReviews_data_from_Joomla_1.5

 

Last, but not least, we have added AlphaUserPoints integration for user activities and wrote two new payment handlers for the PaidListings add-on and they will become available after upgrading to the latest version. These are points handlers for JomSocial and AUP points which complement very well with the existing points features in JReviews. You could also use some 3rd party extensions for letting users pay for point credits so they can later spend them on the site to submit or upgrade listings.

 

For a complete list of changes please refer to the changelogs:

 

JReviews Changelog

 

GeoMaps Changelog

 

PaidListings Changelog

 

JReviews Express

 

We hope you enjoy this release! Our next big task is media integration for listings and reviews. This is a complex project so we'll take our time to do it right.