Thread: Who moderates reviews?

Who moderates reviews?

Just a quick question - who moderates a listing review, the business owner or the site owner?

Only the site admin can moderate the reviews (not including the actual rating), and these appear in the comments section of the wp-admin. The business owner can only reply to a review on the front end. Thanks.

Thanks once again, Pepsi!

I'm meeting my client to discuss the theme - I'm a lot more confident now.

You're welcome, just let us know if you have any more questions :)

Hi, Pepsi,

Just got back from a meeting with my client and he has three key questions.

The first relates to the main front page search bar. All the showcase sites feature the same bar as is, but my client wants something more focussed. He will have around six categories and wants to add a drop down of those categories to search in the "search for" section.

In addition, the "Near" section would benefit from a specific county (state) search option as the site will be targeted at UK-only businesses. Again, as a drop-down.

The second question relates to the home page. Most of the showcase sites feature the same layout, mainly taken up by listings and light on branding. My client's going for a celebrity endorsement, so wants this to feature heavily on the front page along with his own branding, rather than the largely generic look of the showcase sites. Must the front page be the listing page, or can it be another page with images and specific branding?

Finally - Reviews. I understand how these work, but can the reviews feature an image upload - in this case a pet picture - as this is a pet boarding site?

That's the main queries out of the way - so sorry for bombarding you with so many questions in one thread.

No problem at all, we're happy to answer any questions you may have :)

In this instance, each of the questions you have relate to a customization of the default theme, as they are not options there already which can be updated within the Vantage admin dashboard. Ultimately yes, these can be done by an experienced developer, and there is no encryption which would prevent you from doing so. Although the showcase sites mainly feature a look similar to the default theme layout, there is no limitation to what can be done or how it needs to look (we just haven't yet had a customer submit their website for our showcase which perhaps shows this more clearly, but it doesn't mean it hasn't been done ;)) . In terms of customizations, we strongly recommend the use of child themes to prevent you losing all of your modifications in the process of an update.

You may also wish to note we have some useful documentation in our AppThemes Developer centre for those who are looking to customize any of our themes, so you have a better idea of how this can be done. Thanks.

Hi, Pepsi,

I think you misunderstood what I was asking here!

I've taken a look at the developer section and there are no code samples, no discussions and basically nothing of any help whatsoever. This is ironically in stark contrast to Open Source sites where you can often pick up code that's very close to what developers are trying to do for their clients. In addition, with Open Source themes and plugins, if it doesn't work, you simply uninstall and go elsewhere. No money lost.

In your case, the cost of the theme is very much at the high end of WordPress coding (certainly the highest cost I've ever seen for a theme) so its would be commercial suicide if certain assurances weren't sought as there is no guarantee this theme works at all. Some examples of your showcase sites seem to be a bit flaky in operation.

I accept the search query may be a little bit complex - I didn't want you to tell me how - just assure me it was possible - maybe even point to where it had been done before.

For the change of front page, WordPress allows you to set any page as the home/front page from the WP-dashboard. I just wanted to know if changing from the listings page breaks anything on the theme. A simple question, surely.

Finally another easy one. Is it a straight-forward job to add an image upload to the review section - OK, I know some WP knowledge would be required, but is it 5 minutes work, an hour a major section re-write?

Its not useful to say an "experienced developer" can do any work - including writing an entire theme, but we're here as our levels are not that high and we like ready made themes that still allow easy customisation.

If I could ask you to simply give answers that say, yes, changing the front page to another page is fine, changing the search needs some new code, but is straightforward, adding an image to a review is entirely possible is all I want to know.

What I don't want is to happen is to ask my client to buy this, find it uses some weird, non-standard coding method that is so badly written that only an expert can reverse-engineer it and that I have to give the client back the money and lose all creditability.

Now you may think this is too much to ask - but look at this example of another theme's support desk - for a free theme.

http://themeid.com/forum/topic/1086/...gets-possible/

How can they do that - and you can't?

I understand what you're saying, but asking about customizations in a pre-sales sense is a rather generic question in terms of "can it be done?" because the answer is always going to be yes. It's not possible for me to know how easy it will be for any individual without any knowledge of their coding skills, so I can only assume if someone is asking about complex changes to the theme, that they know what they're doing. AppThemes does not officially support customizations, so it's not recommended that you purchase a theme intending to modify the code and expect to receive fixes from our support team as these kinds of questions are subject to community based support only.

The things I can be specific about, for example, is that you're asking if the homepage can be set to a static page from the wp-admin without modification, and the answer to that is not really. Our themes are not designed to use a static page that is not the listing page, so if you were to change this setting, then certain links will not work correctly and therefore you would need to modify some code in order for these to function. If you really wanted to try using one you could create a file and put it in the theme folder. It will load that first. Another option would be to install another instance of WordPress and put it in a sub-dir, then just link to it. If you need to see some examples of code, you can have a look at some of our available tutorials if you wish.

If our customer base was not as big, and our forums were not as busy as the example you have shown, then sure we would have the resources to respond to customization questions in the same manner. The reality is, there are way too many variables when it comes to customizations, and it's not realistic to have a support team to look through the code of every person who makes changes to the default theme and "fix" those issues. Our code is well written and commented, with a quality development team behind our themes and plugins, so we have full confidence in our products. The complexity and time spent on creating and evolving these products, and being able to deliver regular updates and a dedicated support team makes them worthy of purchase. If someone purchases one of our themes planning to make a whole lot of modifications, then this is ultimately their responsibility to make it happen. I hope this information helps :)