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.

[lazytown]

Is this functioning well with 4.1.7 ?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by vissa

Is this functioning well with 4.1.7 ?

As marked, this beta mod works with 4.1.x

[downloadsuk]

Hi Ted - many thanks for your mod - it really is great.

I did read that you were looking at a solution to 'bulk' import the products via xml or csv - This would of course be a fantastic addition.

Are you still planning on adding it?

Many Thanks,

[Ted S]

Yes. XML imports will be a part of the next release which is turning into a rather large update the more I work on it.

CSV and other text formats will not be used as they become problematic when dealing with descriptions.

[Ted S]

Product Forum users [and prospective users]... Very excited to announce the release of 1.1.0 beta -- a significant update to this modification based on member feedback.

New features include...

- New index allows browsing & searching of products
- After creating a review, users can share it to Facebook & Twitter
- Members can post products w/ modifcation & usergroup restrictions

- Review counts are shown on each user's profile page
- Products can now be grouped into categories
- Import product data quickly through XML feeds

And of course a few bug fixes...

- mySQL change to allow for capturing reviews per user
- Improved logic ot hide empty first posts [thanks to Adrian Schneider]
- Support for 4.0 - 4.1 with dual WYSIWYG editors

Given the scope of the update this is definitely a beta. Give it a whirl and let me know if you find any issues or something missing that I can add right in.

As big a change as this is, there's still a few features not included. See post #4 of this thread for what's coming up next.

Note for bigger boards: Upgrading will rebuild the productforums field in the user table. This can take a few minutes

[Ted S]

To upgrade -

1- Upload all files again including the includes and xml scripts.
2- Upgrade the plugin file now found in the /do not upload/ folder
3- Review the Product Forums. Many new features require setting choices

[CoZmicShReddeR]

WTF!! Take this plugin down it just renamed every post in my entire forums to a review name!

[Ted S]

See next post. We've recreated the issue to debug it directly.

However if you are able to explain when exactly this happened it would be very useful as we are not certain when exactly the issue occurs.

From your brief description, presumably you had added one or more products and reviews when this occured...

Do you know what had last been done? Writing a review? Approving a review? Editing a review?

Had you updated from 1.0.4 before this occured or was it a new install?

Did you run any counter updates or other routines on your forum?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by CoZmicShReddeR

WTF!! Take this plugin down it just renamed every post in my entire forums to a review name!

I've been able to re-create your issue, clearly reason to take the beta mod offline as we resolve this.

From the looks of it, one of the triggers to make new product threads or replies which runs through a vBulletin core engine is mis-firing and performing a hard update on other threads. Unfortunately on a clean install we are unable to make this happen again despite trying many variations of settings, even removing checks in the mod for validity... Hopefully we will be able to track this down and issue a release in the next few days.

[CoZmicShReddeR]

This was a an updated install and I did recover my forums from a 4 day old backup but this happened as soon as I add a product...