Check out the JReviews 2.4 Playground Site!

[Alejandro]

We are very excited to finally be able to show you what we have been working on for a very long long time. The first step is to give you access to the testing site we put together to showcase some of the new features. Access is front-end only and you need to create an account to be able to make submissions to the site. We may need to reset the site from time to time by restoring it from a backup so it's possible your account may not work the next time you try it.

 

http://media.reviewsforjoomla.com

 

JReviews 2.4 allows media uploads for listings and reviews. Users will be able to upload videos, photos, attachments and audio files. All of these can be tested on the playground site right now. There are new media pages for video and photo galleries. There's a media module and photo/attachment uploads also appear in the JomSocial stream. We are still working on posting video and audio uploads to the JomSocial stream and later on we'll try to integrate them into FB, Twitter, etc.

 

We chose to offload video and audio encoding to specialized 3rd party services because it makes the integration hassle free. It's necessary to encode the uploads so they can be shown in HTML5 for iOS and modern browsers with flash fallback for older browsers. You will be able to choose from three of them right from the start: Transloadit.com, Zencoder.com and Encoding.com. We've also integrated Amazon S3 so you can store your videos and audio files for streaming there. Optionally you can store photos and attachments in S3 as well.

 

There are over 80 new settings just for media, and most of them can be overridden at the Listing Type level.

 

We've already developed an image migration add-on that will make the process of converting your existing images to the new version very straightforward.

 

We are still a few weeks away from being able to release a beta. The themes are a work in progress so there will be substantial changes from now till release. We are working on several layouts for presenting media in detail pages and some of them are still unfinished.

 

You are welcome to post your feedback in the post below.

 

http://www.reviewsforjoomla.com/forum/index.php?topic=19806.0

 

Please keep in mind that we want to release this very soon so the focus is on fixing bugs,  finalizing the themes and some minor features. We still haven't looked into upgrading the PaidListings add-on to work with the new media version and that in itself will be a huge amount of work that will most likely not be ready for the initial beta release. For this reason we are not likely to incorporate any feature requests for the initial beta release.