Latest Status

Posted on May 11, 2013 by row1

It has been a long time since the last update. But looking on Twitter or Bitbucket, you can see that development is still ongoing. Sadly most of this development is not on new features, instead a lot of time has been spent on getting Simple Review working on Joomla 3. So far no major issues have been found with Joomla 3, instead there has been a lot of small time consuming issues that require sifting through a lot of sparse and outdated Joomla documentation trying to figure out what Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5 functions have been removed in 3 and then finding their replacements (if any). An example of a baffling breaking change in Joomla is that on the JUser class they renamed the function authorize to authorise. It may not seem like a big deal to the person who made the change, but even for a such a small change it does take a non-trivial amount of time to find out that there is a problem, find out what the problem is, find a solution to the problem and then write a fix that is going to work in Joomla 3 and earlier. I really do hope that the Joomla 3 codebase is now of sufficient quality that they don’t have to make so many breaking changes…again.

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4.0.02 Alpha Released

Posted on September 16, 2012 by row1

Another alpha version of Simple Review 4 has been released (download component). Being an alpha version it is not recommended for a live site (it does seem to run fine though!). This release fixes some bugs and merges the ‘Top’ and ‘Latest’ module into a single module (download module).

Changes:

  • New. Review field placeholders now support raw rendering by using an underscore suffix e.g. {Review:Field:1_}.
  • Fix. Call to undefined method TemplateCategoryFrontBase (#1).
  • Fix. Option being set incorrectly (#2).
  • Fix. Review Title Helper using incorrect path to interfaces (#3).
  • Fix. Community Builder not being detected (#4).
  • Fix. List title placeholder not working (#6).
  • Fix. Not able to change the review’s author in Joomla 2.5 (#7).
  • Fix. Cannot assign ACL (#9).
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Source Code Available – Help Wanted

Posted on August 4, 2012 by row1

You can now find the source code hosted on Bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/row1/simple-review/

Simple Review has been going with a single developer for a long time now, a lot of code has been written (and rewritten), but there is still a lot to do. If you are able to help please consider forking the project and then pushing the changes back.

Issue tracking has been moved out of the forum and into Bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/row1/simple-review/issues

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4.0.01 Alpha Released

Posted on July 8, 2012 by row1

An early alpha version of Simple Review 4 has been released. Being an alpha version it is not recommended for a live site (it does seem to run fine though!). This release doesn’t add much but it has been a huge amount of work! The average user may not notice any changes but the follow has taken place:

  • Upgraded to PHP5. Almost every file required changes in order to use PHP5 conventions and to run in strict standards mode with no warnings. It feels great to have finally left PHP4 behind.
  • Joomla .ini files are now used for storing languages. All of the old .php language files have been converted, but since there are still a small amount of hardcoded English strings in the PHP/HTML/JS, it is advisable to avoid creating your own translations until the next release. Work in progress.
  • The CSS in templates is being cleaned up. Simple Review CSS classes will be prefixed with “sr-”. Work in progress.

It has been a long time since the last release, so I decided to release this alpha version to show that it is still being actively developed and has gone through some big and core changes. There is still a lot of work to be done, but at least now I can focus on adding features. Once the code bases settles down I will make the BitBucket code repository public.

You can download Simple Review 4.0.01 alpha for Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 here.

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Joomla.StackExchange

Posted on June 12, 2012 by row1

If you are interested in asking (or answering) Joomla questions then please signup for Joomla! Stack Exchange. Once you have followed the site, please up-vote some questions as we need 31 questions with a vote of 10 to move on to the next stage. The site need your support to get it launched.

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CompojoomComment Support

Posted on April 9, 2012 by row1

A plugin is available to allow CompojoomComment to be used as the commenting system in Simple Review. Compojoom adds a lot of features such as nested comments and rich text formatting. The plugin can be purchased here.

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Module 3.0.13 Released

Posted on February 12, 2012 by row1

Version 3.0.13 of the Top and Latest Review modules has been released. They now support reviews with no ratings.

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hReview Support Reminder

Posted on February 11, 2012 by row1

Since version 3.0.0 Simple Review has supported the hReview microformat in the default template.
The below image is a real-life example of a Simple Review review appearing in Google search results (you can Google “kool keith drugs review sardless” to see for yourself)


This is quite a cool feature and will make your site standout in the search results, so if you are using an old template it might be a good idea to upgrade it.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have teamed up to created http://www.schema.org/ so that their new review formats (and others) will be supported amongst their search engines. The current hReview format will still work, but if you are keen you can upgrade your review templates to support the schema.org ones.

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3.0.13 Released

Posted on January 28, 2012 by row1

Simple Review 3.0.13 has been released (download). An upgrade is available for 3.0.12 users (download, unzip and then follow instructions).

Component release notes:

  • New. Support for Joomla 2.5.
  • Fix. Turning star rating off in comments.
  • Fix. Star rating JavaScript error in comments.
  • Fix. JavaScript error if comment rating is turned off.

This is the last release that will support PHP 4 and the last release for the version 3.0 series.

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2012 Update

Posted on January 24, 2012 by row1

It has been a long time since the last update. I have had some expensive medical issues for the last 4 or so months. This has limited my computer time and I have spend what little free computer time I have had on doing paid work to recoup medical bills. The paid work is starting to dry up in the next two weeks and I seem to be on the mend, so I think the next release will be in February. Version 3.0.13 will be another minor release to fix some niggling bugs and provide the framework for some upcoming changes.

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