Planning and organizing JReviews setup
Listing Types
Listing types are different types of content that you can setup. Basically, with listing types you define how the listing and review forms will look like (which fields they will include).
Examples of listing types you might create:
- Business - a type of listing that will include field groups (fields) like Location (City, Address, Postcode), Contact Info (Phone number, Email address, Website url), etc.
- Hotel - this listing type would include Location and Contact Info field groups the same as the business listing type, but it can also include additional Hotel Info field group with fields like Hotel Amenities, Pricing, etc.
- Restaurant - similarly to hotels and businesses, this listing type would include Location and Contact Info field groups as well, but you can also create additional field group(s) for entering information about restaurant's Cuisine and Menus.
- Product - this type of listing would have a Product Info field group with fields like Brand, Model, Release Date, Product Website, etc.
- Movie - a type of listing that would include a field group with information about the movie (Year, Directors, Actors, Genre) and a field group with affiliate links where visitors can buy/rent movies (Amazon, iTunes, Netflix)
- Event - it would contain event information fields like Event Date and Event Venue.
Listing Types will be assigned to Joomla Categories.
Directories & Categories
Since JReviews uses Joomla’s content system, you will need to create Joomla categories for JReviews listings. Categories will be assigned to a listing type and a directory.
Joomla allows you to create unlimited levels of categories and JReviews provides additional Directory level that can be used to group similar categories. Here is an example of a directory page:
Creating at least one directory is required, but you don't need to show the directory page on your site if you don't want to. The advantage of the directory page is that it can display the complete category tree (all levels of categories), unlike category pages which can only show direct subcategories.
Examples of directories can be found on the JReviews demo site (every top level menu item in the Top Menu is a directory page):
Even though the demo site has many directories (to show different types of sites you can create with JReviews), most sites need just one directory.
The only reason why you might need to create more than one directory is if your site will have categories that are completely unrelated to each other (i.e. business categories and product categories).
Directories that you create will need to be assigned to categories in the JReviews Categories Manager.
Using JReviews Custom Fields for additional categories
Even though Joomla allows you to create unlimited number of categories and unlimited levels of categories, it is not recommended to create a large number of categories as that can make the overall site setup too complex and time consuming (i.e. creating required menu items for every category).
We recommend to create a small number of Joomla categories and extend those categories with JReviews virtual categories.
The virtual categories are actually values of JReviews custom fields. For certain single select or multiple select custom fields you can enable the Click2Search setting and then each field value of that field becomes a virtual category.
Some of the advantages of virtual categories are that new virtual categories can be added "on the fly" during the listing submission and one listing can have multiple virtual categories (both is not possible with Joomla categories).
A good example of using virtual categories is for restaurant's cuisines. You can create a multiple select custom field "Cuisines" and enable Click2Search so that that field values become virtual categories. When visitors click on a certain cuisine, they will get a list page with all listings that have the same cuisine. Examples of virtual categories can be found on the JReviews demo site:
For more info read How to use custom fields as virtual categories.