Review Foundry Review Engine User Manual ABOUT REVIEW FOUNDRY

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• ABOUT REVIEW FOUNDRY
• What Is It?
• Documentation

ABOUT REVIEW FOUNDRY

What Is It?

Whether you call it a review engine, a review script, or review software, Review Foundry is the premier application for managing a review section on your website. So flexible, it even allows people to review one another.

So Review Foundry (http://www.randommouse.com/foundry/) is an advanced review and rating application. But why would you choose it over another program that offers similar functionality? Well, mostly it is the disimilarity between this application and others that makes people choose it. That and an extraordinary flexibility in the degree to which it can be customized.

Unlike most other applications of this type, Review Foundry allows you to offer customer reviews on 3 types of things: items, suppliers, and members. You can elect to ignore 2 of the 3 types when you set up your implementation, and most people do just that. For example, you might want to set up an affiliate review site that deals with hybrid cars. In that case you might represent the cars as items in categories. Most review applications allow you to do exactly this. But with Review Foundry you can go a step further. You can also choose to represent hybrid car dealerships as suppliers, which are found in the yellowpages branch (as opposed to the category branch where items are found). This means the dealerships can be reviewed and rated too, if you want to add that functionality to your site. Moreover each item can be associated with one or more suppliers. So in the current example, each reviewed hybrid car can also be linked to a reviewed hybrid dealership, offering readers a potential route to ownership, and perhaps for you an increased chance of affiliate commission.

So there are item in categories, and suppliers in yellowpages. This represents 2 of the 3 branches that Review Foundry offers. The last involves members of teams (groups of people). Thus, you might use the team branch in an entirely different setting to offer reviews and ratings on people who sign themselves up just for that purpose--to be rated by their contemporaries. This means that members can do things like set themselves up as experts on one thing or another, and have other members of the community rate and review them according to the attributes associated with the particular group. This allows for a large number of potential applications. If you are running an existing community application, such as vBulletin or Ikonboard, or one of the many other forum programs available, then you no doubt have people coming into your site that have much to offer the other members of their community, but to this point have been unable to do so in any effective manner. Review Foundry removes that barrier by allowing your members to "advertise" aspects about themselves, in a coordinated manner, and in a way that may benefit both themselves, the other members, and also visitors to your site. Furthermore, Review Foundry employs an advanced ratings system to collate and display the results.

What else can Review Foundry do? In its least-actualized form it simply functions as a standard item (or link) manager. But by applying a little imagination at the table customization interface, the number of ways Review Foundry could be configured to serve a community is virtually unlimited. Obvious possibilities spring to mind. For example, Review Foundry could be implemented as an MP3 distribution application, or as a gallery for artists (Review Foundry makes file uploads/downloads simple). And, of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The same reviewing/rating system mentioned above can be applied to these categorized items. Furthermore, based on the number of "helpful votes" each review receives, reviewers can be ranked and a separate Top 10, or Top 100, reviewers page allows the best reviewers to be properly appreciated.

A brief summary of the most important Review Foundry features:

• Perl/MySQL -- Written in opensource object-oriented Perl, Review Foundry uses the MySQL server to store most of its data in a relational database.

• Templates -- All generated pages are template-based. In fact, Review Foundry is built on the Template-Toolkit, an extremely powerful templating system that offers all the flexibility from a templating system that you are likely to need. The Template-Toolkit is well designed, well documented, easy to extend, and opensource too. The customizability of your pages lies entirely in your templates: the place it should be.

• Template Manager -- Templates can be edited via a simple-to-use template editor which allows access to every Template-Toolkit template used to fill pages displayed to your users.

• High Level Database Manager -- A built in high-level database management system allows tables to be extended. Add an Item/Member/Supplier feature by adding another column. Change your mind? Alter the column. Easy. Then add a suitable tag to your templates and serve up the data. You can add table indices and even foreign key relations! Records can be easily added, edited, deleted, searched, or listed by members with administrative privileges, independently of the user side of the program.

• Low Level Database Manager -- Review Foundry ships with DBops, a low-level database management system that allows access to those parts of the database that Review Foundry ordinarily keeps hidden. Very useful for investigating the structure of your tables and looking for problems.

• Browsable Record Managers -- EXCLUSIVE to Review Foundry is a TRIO of administrative browsers that allow Items, Suppliers, and Members to be managed from an expanding tree of Categories, Yellow Pages, or Teams. Click on a category to select it, then transfer it to a new location by clicking on another. Click on a member to select it, click on a team to move or copy the member into it. These are just some of the point and click operations that make managing your database a breeze.

• File Upload Manager -- An upload manager is included, which allows files to be uploaded independently of any other fields displayed on a form. If a file cannot be uploaded, you find out about it BEFORE form submission, saving you time and headaches. Maximum uploadable file size can be specified per file-type. Also, for avatars and logos, it is possible to independently specify a maximum file size and a maximum image dimension.

• Editors/Moderators -- Editors can be assigned to evaluate newly-submitted Items and Suppliers. Permissions (to edit/delete/move) are assigned on a per Category, or per Yellow Page, basis. Editors can also act as review moderators.

• Language Templates -- Separate language templates allow for translation or customization of all text seen by the end user. Any language supported by the Latin-1 character set can thus be integrated into your templates.

• Skins -- Public templates are batched together and can be imported and exported as a group. This allows for the creation of new skins. By changing a skin with a few button clicks you can instantly change the look and feel of your Review Foundry implementation. If you are so inclined, and you have sufficiently developed web design skills, you can create a new skin and share it with the Review Foundry community.

• Forum Member Database Integration -- Review Foundry integrates with external member databases, so that the user can be authenticated without ever needing to log in (provided cookies are available from the forum application). Supported couplings include VBulletin, UBBThreads, Ikonboard, Invisionboard, PostNuke, PHPNuke, Phorum and others.

• Built-in Member Management -- Don't have a forum member database to authenticate members? No problem. Review Foundry comes with its own member management system. Each member gets a Profile page where personal information can be gleaned, as well as ALL reviews the member has written on Items, Suppliers, or other Members. This Profile page can also be accessed when a forum coupling is in place.

• Compiled Templates -- Review Foundry supports compiled templates on two levels. If you run the program as a dynamic process, Template-Toolkit can cache the equivalent perl template on disk and reload it each time it is accessed, bypassing the tag parsing process for all but the first invocation of the program. Alternatively, for real speed on the user side, have Review Foundry build static (pure HTML) directories of Categories + Items, Teams + Members, and Yellow Pages + Suppliers, as well as the corresponding Review pages. Extensive use of meta information throughout these pages makes your site very search engine friendly. From these pages, users can perform sorting operations with blinding speed--the presorted pages are already built in!

• Custom Rating Attributes -- Each grouping of Items, Suppliers, and Members can be assigned their own unique rating attributes. So users can rate, for example, the durability, the value for money, and the measure of fun that a Toy Item offers in one Category, while the Toy Supplier could be rated for customer support and overall product quality. Or a member of the "Toy Testers" team could be rated for the quality of their reviews, and their accuracy. The possibilities are endless.

• Image Thumbnailing -- Automatic image thumbnailing is supported. Images can be reduced with GD, NetPBM, or ImageMagick.

• File Download Manager -- A download manager is included, allowing specified files uploaded to a private directory on your server to be downloaded ONLY by registered members. Or you can elect to have files uploaded to a public directory where anyone can download.

• Search Engine -- Items, Suppliers, and Members can be separately searched. Searching on required (or optional) keywords and phrases is supported. Term exclusion is also be supported.

• Email A Friend -- The review page for any Item, Supplier, or Member can be emailed to a friend.

• New Review Alerts -- Members can subscribe to new review alerts, which are sent out when new reviews appear for the Items/Members/Suppliers to which a member is subscribed.

• Add New Items/Suppliers -- Review Foundry can be configured to allow members to submit new Items for consideration. They may also create Supplier accounts and attach these to any Item that they have submitted and had approved. For Members, Suppliers are an optional feature that can be used to add an access point to an Item, e.g. a Member might create a Supplier account for his "Wine Distribution" business and attach it to one or more wines located in the relevant Wine Category.

• Reviewer Rankings -- Reviewers can be ranked. Bylines for the Top Reviewer, Top 10 Reviewers, and Top 100 Reviewers are especially marked with icons when reviews are displayed. These icons link to a separate Top Reviewers page where all reviewers are listed in rank order.

• SSI Inclusions -- If you have existing product pages and would like to be able to pull in information from the Review Foundry database you can do so. By issuing network requests to Review Foundry, and suitable query string parameters, you can grab the latest N reviews (optionally restricted to a specified container, or thing). For example, you could request the latest 5 reviews submitted about the Member with ID=5, considered as a member of the Team with ID=7. You can also request the latest N Item, Member, or Suppliers additions to the database.

• Bad Language Filter -- If words which are deemed unsuitable are detected in submissions, the submission can either be blocked, or specially marked when evaluated by editors.

Documentation

Documentation for Review Foundry, of which this is one of the pages, is an ongoing project. You should find that there is sufficient information here to get you started, and perhaps even enough to start doing some really interesting things. Suggestions for improvement to the manual are always welcomed. As more users gain experience with Review Foundry, and issues are resolved for its application in different areas, information gained from that experience will make its way into these pages.

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