Alejandro Posted February 18, 2014 at 08:12 PM Share Posted February 18, 2014 at 08:12 PM We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the latest JReviews version 2.4.13.1 as well as new add-on versions. This update has been over two months in the making and brings some important improvements and changes in addition to bug fixes. It is very important that you read this rest of this announcement carefully before you upgrade JReviews and Add-ons. Ten days ago we posted an advance notice for this release which you can read here http://www.reviewsforjoomla.com/forum/index.php?topic=25681.0 Min. PHP 5.3 requirement: JReviews 2.4.13.1 now requires PHP 5.3 or higher. It has not been tested with PHP 5.5. Check your PHP version number in the Joomla System Information page before you upgrade. Use a dev site, backup: Due to the large amount of code changes, it is recommended you test the update in a development site first or at least make a backup that you can revert to if something stops working. We did many many upgrade and new installation tests internally, but also on a few client sites beforehand, so we are hopeful there won't be too many issues. Disable and update overrides: If you have customizations in overrides, it is recommended that you disable the overrides before the upgrade in the JReviews Configuration, General tab. After the upgrade of JReviews and Add-ons, take a look around the site to make sure everything works and proceed to update your overrides the the latest version before enabling them again. A complete list of modified files can be found here http://www.reviewsforjoomla.com/changelogs/jreviews/2.4/files_jreviews.txt Add-ons post upgrade: You should see your installed add-ons in the sidebar after the upgrade like usual. If they are not there, clear the cache, reload the page and use the add-ons manager Discover feature to install them. Then proceed to update them via the Remote Install & Update page. You must upgrade the add-ons right away because the old versions are no longer compatible. And to re-cap the improvements and changes in this version: Speed improvements. We re-wrote the most important queries (Listings and Reviews) so they are fully indexed. This should be most noticeable on sites with lots of listings and reviews and high traffic. Some queries just cannot be further improved without changing the database structure, but the improvements in this release should last for a while! There's a new feature in the Fields Manager to create indexes for custom fields. Use this feature to create indexes for fields that you use in click2search and in Field Modules. Add-on manager. We developed a new add-on manager. You can use the manager to easily enable and disable add-ons and it also comes with an add-on installer so you can install add-ons from zipped packages. This opens the door for 3rd parties to develop simple or complex add-ons that can be shared with the rest of the community. It also allows for more elegant overrides that can have configurable settings. Check out the new Add-on Development Documentation where we've also made available three example add-ons to get you started. http://docs.reviewsforjoomla.com/index.php?title=JReviews:Add-on_Development Framework improvements. We separated the add-on locale and add-on menus from the rest of JReviews. This creates more independence of add-ons from JReviews so each add-on can define its own menu types via a new JReviews Menu System plugin. Incremental locale overrides. As part of the framework improvements it is now possible to override the language files with incremental strings only. Instead of copying the whole default.po file for example, just create an empty default.po file and add your string overrides there using the msgid and msgstr. Fields Module. We've brought back the ability for this module to display the number of listings available for each option, without sacrificing performance, and it also works with auto-detect so the 'listing count' changes depending on whether the module is in a directory, category or detail page. We also have a new 'Tag Cloud' mode to the module to display field options in varying sizes based on the number of results for each option. Module Caching. Also related to performance we finally cracked the code related to module caching. We are now using some native Joomla features that allow a single module with dynamic content that changes depending on the page to generate multiple cache instances so the module content doesn't remain static across all pages. We also fixed an issue whereby css and javascript files were duplicated when module caching was enabled. If you have the Joomla configuration cache enabled, then edit your JReviews modules and make sure the cache setting is set to global to take advantage of these improvements. Support for 3rd party Gallery Modules. That's right! JReviews will now sync the main media photo or video image with the Joomla article image so that 3rd party modules like Gavicks News Show Pro and RocketTheme's RokSprocket are now able to display those images. Of course those modules won't be able to display any custom field o rating information out of the box because those features would need to be added directly to the code base of those modules, but we believe this is a great addition to JReviews. New listings are synched automatically. Old listings will be synched on the first visit to the detail page after the ugprade. New expanded theme for the Directory Module. Just use the _expanded theme suffix in the module settings. New settings to toggle category images. For both the category list pages and the category box in those pages. Joomla patch for listing page SEO Manager title override no longer required. Those of you that use the Listing Type SEO Manager title override feature no longer need to apply the Joomla patch that was required in previous versions. We finally found a way to fix this by using a plugin event in our content plugin that we thought was limited to system plugins! To view the complete list of changes in this version visit the changelogs here: http://www.reviewsforjoomla.com/jreviews/changelog http://www.reviewsforjoomla.com/changelogs/jreviews/2.4/geomaps.txt http://www.reviewsforjoomla.com/changelogs/jreviews/2.4/paidlistings.txt Link to comment
Alejandro Posted February 18, 2014 at 11:24 PM Author Share Posted February 18, 2014 at 11:24 PM This section is only visible with a valid subscription. If you have a valid subscription, please login. Link to comment
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