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.

[GCC LLC]

I wrapped it around the XML in product_forums.xml and reinstalled the product into vbulletin. It appeared to update something in all skins and I saw no errors (I also saw nothing get echo'ed back - but it went by all very fast in the install).

Links in the product review forum still do not click through to the corresponding threads. It is not the default vb mobile style, it is another mobile style designed for vB Suite 4.1.x.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by GCC LLC

I wrapped it around the XML in product_forums.xml and reinstalled the product into vbulletin. It appeared to update something in all skins and I saw no errors (I also saw nothing get echo'ed back - but it went by all very fast in the install).

Links in the product review forum still do not click through to the corresponding threads. It is not the default vb mobile style, it is another mobile style designed for vB Suite 4.1.x.

It's not quite that simple... to test you'd have to add it to varrious plugin routines inside the xml script so that echo statements are invoked as you load the pages you want to test (for example, you could echo back a test on the thread / product page or on the forum / product list).

As for how to fix it, I'd still suggest starting with the debugging to insure the mod is getting fired up but that's probably the case which means template hooks become the issues. For that you need to open up a default vB template and your mobile skin's (i.e. SHOWTHREAD which holds the product information) and see which hook variables have been removed.

If that sounds like greek, as the mod author if they ported over all the standard hooks into their SHOWTHREAD and FORUMDISPLAY templates.

[GCC LLC]

Got it figured out. I dug through the plugins and traced everything back to the following, in case anyone else runs into the same issue. Tom, you were correct in that the template hooks are not there by default in mobile styles. I also had to manually create each of the prodforum_* templates in our mobile style for some reason, but that's not a big deal.

The plugin renders the product information at the top of the showthread template into a template called showthread_above_posts. I looked for the hook inside of the SHOWTHREAD template in the mobile theme and it's just not there, so I added it in as follows:

{vb:raw template_hook.showthread_above_posts}

All is well!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by GCC LLC

Got it figured out. I dug through the plugins and traced everything back to the following, in case anyone else runs into the same issue. Tom, you were correct in that the template hooks are not there by default in mobile styles. I also had to manually create each of the prodforum_* templates in our mobile style for some reason, but that's not a big deal.

The plugin renders the product information at the top of the showthread template into a template called showthread_above_posts. I looked for the hook inside of the SHOWTHREAD template in the mobile theme and it's just not there, so I added it in as follows:

{vb:raw template_hook.showthread_above_posts}

All is well!

Fantastic!

How's everything else looking in the mobile theme? You can do a light version of the product page if you use it...

[snakedevil]

Hello Ted,

Thank you for this great mod, but I have a problem when sending an image in PNG, the image sent is no longer transparent but with a black background.

How to fix this please?

Thank you again!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by snakedevil

Hello Ted,

Thank you for this great mod, but I have a problem when sending an image in PNG, the image sent is no longer transparent but with a black background.

How to fix this please?

Thank you again!

That's up to the settings of GD on your server as it resizes the images... Does it happen elsewhere in vB?

[snakedevil]

No problem elsewhere, only on this mod

I have Chevereto and no problem

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by snakedevil

No problem elsewhere, only on this mod

I have Chevereto and no problem

Hrm.

It's something in the image upload script but from the looks of it, could be one of a number of factors. We'll have to play around with it this weekend to see if we can force transparency on all GD setups.

[snakedevil]

Ok thank you,

In the meantime it is possible to display white instead of black?


Can be here ?

function resize($width,$height) {
$new_image = imagecreatetruecolor($width, $height);
imagecopyresampled($new_image, $this->image, 0, 0, 0, 0, $width, $height, $this->getWidth(), $this->getHeight());
$this->image = $new_image;
}

[Ted S]

You can certainly try shifting the function around to see if it helps.

Functions stackoverflow shows people using for transparency:
imagealphablending($pathname, false); imagesavealpha($pathname, true);