Ratings and reviews

One of the things I'm working on is a review site for a subgenre of video games. After looking around on extensions.joomla.org for a bit, it seemed that the most developed package (at the time) was this free component called xtdratings.

I downloaded it and played with it for a bit, but it was kind of confusing-- you needed to install this other component called FacileForms which it was built on, and there were some version compatibility issues to be aware of. I got it basically working, but hadn't started looking into how to customize it (layoutwise) or how the user system worked. Documentation was really sparse, though to be fair, forum support from the creator was REALLY responsive (thanks!).

Shortly afterwards, the xtdratings creator (Alejandro Schmeichler) released a new review component called jReviews which looked much more polished and well-integrated with core Joomla, and now uses AJAX for a lot of things. Pretty cool. The only catch was now it was no longer free. Well, I played with the demo site for a bit, and decided to just bite the bullet and get it, since it would probably save me a lot of time to set up, and then I could move on to other things.

Installed it without any problems, and it was easier to learn than the old system. But then as I was testing out the various pages, I found that the drop-downs on the "submit new entry" page weren't working for me... but they work just fine on the demo site, as well as on a temp site I made on my other server to test with. I spent several evenings trying to figure out what was causing it, including confirming that it was a problem with the actual implementation (codewise or serverwise) and not something silly like a typo.

Finally I concluded that it wasn't something obvious, and decided to ask for help on the jReviews forums. So that's where I am now-- still trying to figure out why the drop-down menus aren't working for me... but at least I have someone more experienced helping me with this now. And once I learn the system well enough myself, I'll be more than happy to return the favor by helping others who are less experienced than myself. <3