Who wants this cool new feature?

September 29, 2016 at 12:08 AM

Hi everyone,

On the heels of last week's PHP 7 compatibility release update, which gives you the opportunity to double your site's page loading time by upgrading your server and JReviews; and less than a week later, we have something very cool to show you. We are not giving it to you just yet, but it's already live on our Joomla demo site (and of course it also works on WordPress).

This pretty cool feature also has an impact on page loading times. I am referring to pagination without page reloads! That's right. We've initially implemented this for lists of listings, reviews, media, reviewers, latest reviews and latest discussions and it's pretty sleek. By requesting only the next page, instead of having to re-load the entire page with the template, css, javascript, modules, etc. the user experience improves as the wait for the next page goes down. And not only that, but it also works with the page filters like sorting and the buttons to change the layout (blogview, tableview, etc.).

It's implemented with SEO in mind so that even if the browser doesn't reload, the URL in the browser address bar is updated and it's also possible to go back in the browser history. Since all the links remain intact on the page, just as they were before, there's no impact on how search engines index your site. We've also made the feature optional via a new setting in the configuration that allows you to enable ajax pagination which is disabled by default.

To see the new pagination in action, head over to the demo site and click on the different links on the Main Menu on the left sidebar. Also try the page on your phone because we implemented a slightly different interface with only previous and next buttons at the bottom.

So, who wants this cool new feature? Since we just released an update last week, it's probably too soon to release another one, no?

Let us know if you want it really bad so we can decide if we should hold off until we have more changes or release it sooner and while you are at it, why not take a second to like our Facebook page so we can really feel the love!

PS: We are not implementing infinite loading because it creates many usability issues. A load more button would be nice, but would require a very large number of changes to theme files and poses challenges for lists with maps, so we decided against it for now and we like the feature a lot the way it works now.

September 29, 2016 at 12:43 AM