JReviews and add-ons are PHP7-ready right now

September 22, 2016 at 03:05 PM

We are very excited to let you know that you can now use JReviews and all add-ons with PHP7. If you are not aware PHP7 offers significant performance and memory usage improvements over PHP5. And when I say significant, I mean SIGNIFICANT! Applications can see up to 2x faster performance and up to 50% better memory consumption than PHP5.6.

Stop! and continue reading. Before you jump out of your seat to do the upgrade, there are several things you need to consider:

Make sure every Joomla extension and WordPress plugin you use is compatible with PHP7 and consider doing the upgrade on a development site first.
Joomla users, you need to be running at least Joomla 3.5, but that's already obsolete, so consider upgrading to Joomla 3.6. Earlier versions of Joomla don't work with PHP7!
You'll need to update the ionCube loaders to v6.0.3 or higher which you can download from the ionCube site
Once you've installed the new loaders, you won't be able to access remote updates in JReviews. So you need to download the package from the Client Area. Inside you'll find a folder with the name "jreviews-for-php7" with the JReviews package inside
- Joomla users: Go to the Extensions Manager, Install page to install this package. You can do it over the existing JReviews installation without uninstalling.
- WordPress users: You need to disable the JReviews plugin. Delete it, and then install the new package and re-activate
Now that you have JReviews working on PHP7, you need to update all the add-ons to their PHP7 version. Go to the remote install & update page in JReviews and update all add-ons.

Did you already upgrade all add-ons to the latest version on PHP5 before upgrading to PHP7?

No problem, in the last step above, instead of updating the add-ons from the remote install & update page, you'll remove them first, then re-install them. The data for the add-ons will not be lost when you do this.

Other changes in this update

These updates also include several changes and fixes for JReviews and add-ons. For JReviews we introduced a new Shortcode type called "field". It allows you to output a specific field from any listing anywhere on the site. The shortcode format is:

[jreviews type="field" name="jr_state" listing_alias="blue-hill"]

But you can also omit the listing_alias attribute and JReviews will auto-detect the listing from the current page (JReviews listing detail, view all reviews for a listing or review discussion pages) and output the correct value for that listing. Otherwise the shortcode is removed and the output suppressed.

There's also an important fix for Joomla clients hosted on SiteGround and using our JReviews SEF Plugin and the jSGCache plugin.

Please check the changelog for each product to read more about the changes. Once you update to the PHP7 version, going forward the system will deliver the correct php5 or php7 package when you use the remote updater.

September 22, 2016 at 05:26 PM