Introduction
The Jomres review feature is a facility to allow guests of hotels to leave reviews about properties that they've visited/used. Only logged in registered users can leave reviews. Additionally, if the Site Configuration "Only property guests can review?" option is set to Yes, then the guest will have needed to make a booking with that property before they can leave a review.
Settings
There are four settings available in the Site Configuration area which a Site Manager can use to alter the review feature's functionality.
- Use Jomres review functionality?
- Automatically publish reviews? "If you set this to No you will need to manually publish reviews". If this is set to No you will need to manually approve reviews by visiting this Reviews page and viewing each property and their reviews, and manually approving those reviews you want to publish.
- Set reviews to test mode? "Normally property managers cannot review properties. With test mode enabled, they can. Naturally this is not ideal in a production environment." This feature allows you to log in as a property manager and create reviews and is intended to make it easier for you to add reviews for the purposes of testing layout changes if reviews do not already exist, and to populate a new property with reviews.
- Only property guests can review? The guest will have needed to make a booking with that property before they can leave a review
This page
Here you will see a list of all properties in the system. If a property has reviews, then it's background will be highlighted. If it has unpublished reviews, then that background will be the "alert" colour of the currently selected jquery css style. If a property has had a review reported, then that will also be indicated in the list.
To see a specific property's reviews, click on the edit icon for that property.
When that icon is clicked you'll be taken to the property reviews page. From here you can publish/unpublish a review, or delete it if required.
Frontend functionality
Viewing reviews
Property managers cannot edit/publish/unpublish a review, therefore there is no information for them to refer to regarding review functionality.
For a user to be able to create a review, they need to be a logged in user. Depending on other settings mentioned previously, they may or may not be able to add a review.
The review ratings can be seen in several different pages. The property details page includes a tab "Reviews" where a breakdown of all reviews can be see, with ratings and comments. Ratings are determined based on a combination of guest's judgements of the following criteria.
Hospitality
Location
Cleanliness
Accommodation
Value for money
Services
Additionally the ratings can be seen in the property listing page (i.e. the property list seen after a search is performed).
From the property details page a user can add a new review by clicking the "Add a new review." link. Once this is clicked they are taken to the "Add a new review" page.
Because the view review page is a discreet plugin in Jomres, it can also be seen independently by viewing the view reviews task, so for example you'd be able to view the reviews of property 74 you'd set the url of your browser to something like task=view_property_reviews&property_uid=74 (eg, on my localhost installation the direct url is http://localhost/jr4/index.php?option=com_jomres&Itemid=53&task=show_property_reviews&property_uid=74)
Additionally, there is an internal plugin called "popular_properties" (not to be confused with the popular properties module) which will rate the properties based on their reviews, placing the highest first. It also offers links so that a guest can drill down into a specific region if they like. Once the plugin is installed, you'd view that plugin via a link similar to http://localhost/jr4/index.php?option=com_jomres&Itemid=53&task=popular_properties (naturally you'd need to replace "localhost" with the domain of your own server). This plugin can also be called via the [[The jomres_asamodule plugin]].
Adding a review
From the Add a review page the guest can enter general comments, pros and cons, and rate individual aspects of a property.