Major Additions - Product Review Forums ? Research, Review & Compare Items

Version 1.4.0 has been released to remove the giftery / list it integration of the addon now that service has been discontinued. No upgrade is needed though there have been a few other bug changes since 1.3.5.

Finding Feedback Can be Like a Needle in a Haystack

The more your forum grows, the more of a challenge it becomes to sort through the history and get the full story.

Product Review Forums Brings Structure to the Chaos

As a full-featured product management addon, PRF sits on top of your forum allowing you to create defined products which, unlike individual posts, stay relevant over time. Each comment, review and even product updates filter back into this one spot allowing for a quick and comprehensive overview while the individual discussions rage on as always.

Here's just a few of the many features you'll find in PRF:

• Bring structure to products with established pages & reviews
• Reduce the number of repetitive posts from members looking up the same info
• Increase your traffic with content-rich, seo friendly, product listings
• Drive revenue by adding your own affiliate links to product listings
• Increase the activity stream's value with review integration
  
• Engage visitors with integrated wishlists from Giftery.me

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Installation is not upload & go... individualized settings are required. Read the install file.

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QUICK TIPS:
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Enabling Product Forums: To show product details and ratings, each product-forum must be enabled in the forum manager.

Adding Products: You may upload products one at a time through the admin [includes an image uploader using GD] or you can bulk import through XML. You can also enable users to add moderated products through a global and usergroup option.

Product Review Index: To access your forum's product overview go to www.yoursite.com/productforums.php - You may want to add a link to this to your navbar or as a tab.

Customization: This addon is made to be customized. To change the color schema see clientscript/vbulletin_css or dive right on in to the templates and phrases.

Powered by Giftery.me: This mod is maintained includes two integrations you should know about. Both can be controlled through the mod options.

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Your server needs curl to run this function [curl lets us fetch the images from their remote source quickly and without worrying about limited php settings].

I enable curl in localhost xampp and ran that script, now there are NO images for the Products already listed, the add image from an url is gone too, all I have open to me now is to upload a new image!

This is no good at all for when upgrading my live site, why are the external linked images deleted?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

I enable curl in localhost xampp and ran that script, now there are NO images for the Products already listed, the add image from an url is gone too, all I have open to me now is to upload a new image!

This is no good at all for when upgrading my live site, why are the external linked images deleted?

When a local image is made, the old link is replaced... One product, one image path.

Essentially the script just sees an image field. Whether it's internal or external is irrelevant to a browser or the script and thus calling one field avoids having to check two places for images. Speed is good.

That said, in the syncing process there's a number of sanity checks in place so if an image doesn't load, isn't a valid type, etc it gets skipped over and the external link remains in place. The process runs one image through at a time to avoid any issues with something breaking mid-way and reloads after 25 images to avoid browser timeouts.

But critical errors can always throw curve balls so for beta 3 we're adding a field to store the old link. Just in case.

When you re-ran the script did it say there was nothing to process? Are all of the products now showing local paths?

You can query: SELECT productid,mainphoto,uploadimg FROM pf_products

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

The add image from an url is gone too, all I have open to me now is to upload a new image!

Once you use the uploader on a product we assume you're uploading images [for that product] and hide the fields from view to keep the edit field less cluttered.

I'm not sure why you'd want to go from an uploaded image to an external url rather than another upload but you can reset it by changing the uploadimg flag to 0.

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

The err is mine Ted, I have made an error in the image view url in the core settings, just trying to figure out what I should have in there now.

[ywwz]

Doesnt' work for me. 4.2.0

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

Hiya Ted,
doesn't matter what I change the "Image View Url" to in the core settings, when I check the view in Products listing page all I see is this text where the thumbnail should be:

product photo for Peterson System Smooth 317 Small Briar

Attachment 139808
When I use firebug to check the image location I see this:

/productphotos/50014e732fa54_thumb.jpg

and a message saying "failed to load the given url"

In the core settings I have set the Image View Url to '/productphotos' but still cannot see any images anywhere.

I have the images in "C:\xampp\htdocs\vb4dev\productphotos"

Any ideas what I am doing wrong here TEd, it's all getting to be a bit of a headache now!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by ywwz

Doesnt' work for me. 4.2.0

Care to be more specific? Have you followed the install guide? A

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

Hiya Ted,
doesn't matter what I change the "Image View Url" to in the core settings, when I check the view in Products listing page all I see is this text where the thumbnail should be:

Attachment 139808
When I use firebug to check the image location I see this:

/productphotos/50014e732fa54_thumb.jpg

and a message saying "failed to load the given url"

In the core settings I have set the Image View Url to '/productphotos' but still cannot see any images anywhere.

I have the images in "C:\xampp\htdocs\vb4dev\productphotos"

Any ideas what I am doing wrong here TEd, it's all getting to be a bit of a headache now!

So /productphotos/ is the folder images are set to go to... but when you open it are the images there? If so, do they load properly?

If not, try changing one or two products to an external url [via your database or adding a new item], run the sync script again and see how those look.

You can run this version of admincp/productforums.php which will print debug code if you're not sure on the paths

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

Hi Ted, the images are present in the /productphotos/ folder but are not loading, I tried adding two new products on my test environment, nothing changed.

I uploaded the new admincp/productforums.php you posted but don't know how to get the debug stuff to show, I turn on debugging but have no idea how make it show!

I think it is going to be simpler for me to delete my existing install on my live site and re-install with 1.3 when it's stable and start afresh. I don't want my site to be running a patched up version of your brilliant mod, I should like it to be functioning fully and properly.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

Hi Ted, the images are present in the /productphotos/ folder but are not loading, I tried adding two new products on my test environment, nothing changed.

I uploaded the new admincp/productforums.php you posted but don't know how to get the debug stuff to show, I turn on debugging but have no idea how make it show!

I think it is going to be simpler for me to delete my existing install on my live site and re-install with 1.3 when it's stable and start afresh. I don't want my site to be running a patched up version of your brilliant mod, I should like it to be functioning fully and properly.

In a controlled environment beta means "this mostly works, we're testing to fix the rest" but in mass software beta is more akin to "this works every way we've tested, now we need to see what happens when you try it under other settings". Simply put there is no way for us to account for all of the possible variations, setting, servers that exist out there so while it's painful to watch "issues" come in, it's how mods work.

And, given how vBulletin runs mods, upgraded or new, you get the exact same build structure.

..........

At this point there are no known issues with 1.3.0 beta including the image sync routine -- so obviously we'd like to understand what's happening to your site and if there is indeed an issue in the script before we roll this code to "stable".

So, if you're up for it, let's think through this...

• Correct me if I'm wrong but images (3 versions per product) do exist in /productphotos/.
• When you view one locally it loads and looks like, well, a product image
• But when you load it from the page it does not.

Does that sum up the issue you are experiencing?

The debug script I provided only runs when you run the image sync process on new images. It's completely unrelated to the admin setting.