Looking for software to handle reviews
 

I'm looking for a solution for handling posting of reviews. OUr site regularly reviews products and the current way of posting them is a head ache.

I have looked at review post but it only allows one image to be uploaded. I am looking for something to create a review like what you might read on CNet or other sites. Basicly, a pages with text and images as the person postng wants to lay them out. Hopefully, it would also update a master list of reviews.

Hoping you understand what I am looking for and can point me in the right direction.

I had some work on this issue so let me give you coder perspective about adding images:

Article/Tutorial scripts is expected to include images and for vb-integrated solutions this integration can be possible by using [img] tag of vbulletin. However this solution is not perfect because:
a) The image should already be on the net. So author can not upload it while sending the article.
b) As you know you can not format the image if you use img tag. That is, the image just appears in the page but you can not add text say next to it, or put it inside a table etc. And when this happens articles do not look very perfectly formatted.

So if you forget about [img] tag and consider having a image upload interface (like attachment interface of vbulletin) where author can upload his images into the article, you have a problem of formatting them inside the article. You can get the images from the author computer ok, but then how can the script use them in the article? If you add them all at the end of article and ask the visitors to click them to display them, this is ok. But it does not look perfect then. For instance when you write a tutorial about a computer game, you want to give a screenshot in the middle of it to display what you are talking about so the images are expected to appear in certain places of the text. But the problem is how the interface should handle it?

The only solution I could come up with is:
The author sends the images like they are sending attachments. Then he is expected to use $image1, $image2, $image3 variables in his article to make these images appear in certain places in his article. This solution is the only one that I could come up with but still I think it is not very handy as it might be confusing for newbie users.

So any suggestions?

(BTW. I meant an article interface where articles is not only sent by admins but site members/visitors too. If only admins sent the articles, then the solution is easy, you just enable HTML for the articles and admin can format his images with HTML. But when non-admins are also sending tutorials you can not enable HTML for security reasons.)

Or alternatively, upgrade to vB3, and use the Multiple Attachments, or use the Multiple Attachments hack for vB2;)

Satan

I'm looking for the same kind of software, although I don't have multiple image requirements. Because we're trying to increase our exposure with "normal" Internet users (i.e., those for whom cool forum software like vB presents too much of a learning curve to bother with), we have no option other than integrating third-party software.

I've been looking at Review Post Pro, but quite honestly the fact that they don't respond to the questions in their Pre-Sale forum (and that I can't find any examples of the software implemented anywhere other than the parent company of RP) turns me off and doesn't bode well for their customer service or support.

See www.acuramdx.org 's dealer ratings system for the kind of thing I'm looking for (although we want to be able to review vendors and product, as well, so at least one image would be required). The software must be able to piggyback off of vB's user database.

Any suggestions?

i'm pretty sure smoothie has review post running over at www.macfora.com if you want to check it out. there are other places too, loads of them, i just can't remember any others off the top of my head.

ok, lied there, that software looks nicer though, check it out.

as for rpp - http://www.alwaysmad.com/reviews/

or google for "powered by: review post pro" and see if you find any...

I'm an ass and thought I'd posted this in the other thread... :(

Thanks for the link and the idea. Sometimes the peroxide invades my mind. :D