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.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

Okay, so essentially I need to add sku's no matter what, it makes more sense to me to add the real ones, adding fake sku's would be a bit faster as I would not have to access the real ones from the source site but it feels wrong to me so I will add the real ones.

Ted, once I delete the existing Products and then import the xml's again, is there some way I can stop them from showing in the activity stream. Doing this is really going to annoy my members, it otherwise would add 395 new posts to the activity stream, I can't afford to anger my members with this again. I see I can exclude Product Reviews from the Activity Stream but I can't find any way of excluding the new threads created by the xml's in the forum specified in the core settings..

Can you exclude the forum from the stream? I've only worked with it enough to create our custom bit for reviews.

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Can you exclude the forum from the stream? I've only worked with it enough to create our custom bit for reviews.

Oddly no, you would think vB would have included the option to include/exclude forums from the stream, bit stumped with this one!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

Oddly no, you would think vB would have included the option to include/exclude forums from the stream, bit stumped with this one!

Actually I'm not surprised. The activity stream is the most modular part of vB4 I've worked with and clearly just getting started... In searching for examples of mods with their own bits I found none so while I don't know that PRF is the first to get into it, it is possible.

There's no hooks for us to plug into, which is why we didn't make any exclusions in 1.3 but you can trick it manually... but it's not a solve I'd suggest.

How unique are your titles [i.e. how many overlap with other products]?

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Actually I'm not surprised. The activity stream is the most modular part of vB4 I've worked with and clearly just getting started... In searching for examples of mods with their own bits I found none so while I don't know that PRF is the first to get into it, it is possible.

There's no hooks for us to plug into, which is why we didn't make any exclusions in 1.3 but you can trick it manually... but it's not a solve I'd suggest.

How unique are your titles [i.e. how many overlap with other products]?

A great many have similarities, there are multitudes fot Products from the same manufacturers, IE there are several listings starting with Falcon, or Peterson and so on. I am more than a little intrigued to learn where you are going with this.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

A great many have similarities, there are multitudes fot Products from the same manufacturers, IE there are several listings starting with Falcon, or Peterson and so on. I am more than a little intrigued to learn where you are going with this.

Well we don't have to match on SKU + Title, we could just do title but if there's products with identical titles that would cause all sorts of problems and essentially leave you with multiple items for one and no way to find what's missing.

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Well we don't have to match on SKU + Title, we could just do title but if there's products with identical titles that would cause all sorts of problems and essentially leave you with multiple items for one and no way to find what's missing.

Every Product in the xml's have their own unique title, there are similar titles but none are identical!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

Every Product in the xml's have their own unique title, there are similar titles but none are identical!

admincp/productforums.php

checks on title alone [be sure to test this first before running it in production!]

[Kirk Fitzgerald]

Hiya Ted,

I placed that in my testbed localhost site, navigated to localhost site to products, the problem still exists, when I upload an xmls to the test site every letter 'd' now has a letter 'j' following it in product titles and descriptions!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kirk Fitzgerald

Hiya Ted,

I placed that in my testbed localhost site, navigated to localhost site to products, the problem still exists, when I upload an xmls to the test site every letter 'd' now has a letter 'j' following it in product titles and descriptions!

Ok but first let's see if the import update worked...

When you ran it what sort of output did you get [it should tell you if it updates or creates a product for each record].

Any duplication?

[appsfinder]

when submit a review i get an error how do i fix thanks,

Oh great, you had to go and press THAT button. There goes the whole site. Just kidding...

We had an issue posting your review because of
[ARG:2 UNDEFINED]. Try again or report this to our team and incldue code 164251-B.