Reviews 1.1.0 — put what your customers wrote on your front page

Nearly every storefront has a band of testimonials on it. On most small stores that band is a Custom HTML module holding three quotes somebody typed in once, attributed to first names, never updated again. Shoppers have learned to read straight past it — and they are right to, because nothing about it is checkable.

Meanwhile the same store is often sitting on a few hundred real reviews, written by people who actually paid, locked inside the tab on the product page where only somebody already looking at that product will ever see them.

Reviews & Ratings 1.1.0 is out today, and it closes that gap. It adds a storefront module that takes those real reviews and puts them anywhere you can place a Joomla module: your home page, a category page, a landing page, a product sidebar. The release also changes the shape of the download — one package now holds the plugin and the module, with a single update stream.

A “What customers say” block, built from what customers said

The new module is Solidshop - Reviews Module (mod_sshop_reviews), created like any other module under Content › Site Modules › New. It renders a grid of review cards. Each card carries the star rating, the review title, the review itself, who wrote it, when, a Verified buyer badge on reviews your store can tie to an order, a link to the product being reviewed, and — when other shoppers have voted on it — how many people found it helpful.

None of that is typed in by you. It is the same approved reviews your product pages already show, read straight from your own database, so the band refreshes itself as new reviews come in and needs no maintenance at all once you have placed it.

It pairs particularly well with the Storefront home menu item that shipped in Core 1.5.0 yesterday: hero slideshow, category tiles, a strip of products, a band of reviews, brands — a front page assembled from modules, with the social proof coming from your own database rather than a rented widget.

Four answers to “which reviews?”

Reviews to show decides which products the reviews are taken from:

• Every product — the whole store. This is the home-page band.
• Chosen categories — reviews of products in the categories you pick. A module on your Outdoor listing quotes people who bought outdoor gear.
• Chosen products — for a campaign landing page built around two or three specific items.
• The product being viewed — the module reads the product from the page it is on, which turns it into a compact reviews block for a product-page sidebar, above or beside the full Reviews tab. On any page that is not a product page it renders nothing at all, so you can safely assign it to All pages.

Rules, not hand-picking

You do not choose which individual reviews appear — that would make the band exactly as trustworthy as the three typed-in quotes it replaces. You set the rules, and the module fills itself:

• Minimum rating — any rating, 3 stars and up, 4 and up, or 5 only. A landing-page band is usually 4 or 5; a product sidebar is usually any, because a page that shows only praise reads as a page that hides complaints.
• Only reviews with a comment, on by default — a rating with nothing written under it is a score, not something a shopper can read.
• One review per product, on by default — so a row of three cards reads as three customers rather than as one chatty product.
• Order by newest, highest rated, most helpful, or random. Most helpful leans on your shoppers’ own voting; random keeps a long-lived home page from showing the same three faces for a month.

Everything the plugin already enforces still applies underneath: only approved reviews are ever read, so anything sitting in your moderation queue, rejected, or marked as spam stays out of the band.

The card, and what it costs you

Under Display Options you set how many cards to show (1–20) and how many columns to use on a wide screen (1–4 — narrow screens always fall back to one). Long reviews are shortened to a character count you choose, cut at the nearest word so the cards in a row stay level; set it to 0 to print them in full. Each part of the card — stars, title, reviewer name, date, verified badge, product link — has its own switch.

There is also a Title heading level setting, which matters more than it sounds. A review title is a heading, and a band of them dropped into a page at the wrong level breaks the document outline that screen readers and search engines both walk. Pick the level that follows the section heading above the module, or set it to No heading when the titles are decorative.

All the cards come from a single database query however many you show, including the products they link to, so a band of twenty costs what a band of three does. The markup uses solidshop-reviews__* classes with a stylesheet of its own, works in dark mode and in right-to-left languages, and overrides like any Joomla module by copying modules/mod_sshop_reviews/tmpl/default.php into your template. The Foundra template already ships an override that renders the module as its testimonial block.

No card links to a page the shopper cannot open

Every card is a link to the product it reviews, which makes product visibility part of the module’s job rather than an afterthought. A review is only used when the visitor looking at the band could actually open the product behind it: published, inside its publish window, in a published category, and on an access level that visitor holds.

So an unpublished product, or one in a members-only category, quietly gives up its place to the next review rather than putting a card in front of a guest that answers “not authorised” when clicked. One card fewer is always better than one broken promise.

The module also honours the same two switches the plugin’s own surfaces do: it renders nothing while the plugin is disabled, or while Enable Reviews is off in the Solidshop options. Turning reviews off turns them off everywhere, rather than leaving a band of moderation data published on your home page.

One download, one update notice

Reviews now ships as a Joomla package: Solidshop_Review_v1.1.0.zip holds both plg_solidshop_review and mod_sshop_reviews. One upload installs both; one update notice refreshes both.

The reason is mundane and worth knowing if you build Joomla extensions yourself: a module shipped as a loose ZIP beside a plugin carries no update stream of its own, so it would install once and then never be offered an update again. Moving the update server onto the package fixes that for good. The pair also uninstalls together, because the module reads the tables the plugin’s uninstall drops — removing one and keeping the other would leave a module querying tables that no longer exist.

If you already own Reviews 1.0.1, you do not need to download anything by hand. The package takes over the update stream your site is already subscribed to, so 1.1.0 appears under System › Update › Extensions like any other update. Install it, then publish the new module and give it a position — Joomla installs modules unpublished and unpositioned, and no update ever rearranges your layout for you.

Also in this release

The review edit screen in the admin was loading its record twice on every open. Joomla’s form view asks the model for the form and then for the item, and building the form has already loaded the item — so the product lookup, the linked order’s reference lookup and the reviewer-email fallback each ran two times. The model now loads the record once per request, through the same admin-model base class the rest of Solidshop’s edit screens use. Nothing changes on screen; a moderator working through a queue simply does half the database work they were doing before.

Requirements & availability

Reviews 1.1.0 needs Solidshop 1.3.0 or later, Joomla 6.0+ and PHP 8.4+. The minimum core has risen from 1.1.0 — 1.3.0 is the release that introduced the admin-model base class the edit screen now loads through — and the package checks it once, before either the plugin or the module is touched, so a too-old core fails cleanly instead of leaving you half installed.

The plugin stays $39, one-time per domain, with 12 months of updates and support; 1.1.0 is a free update inside that window. It is on the Reviews & Ratings page, and every setting is documented under The Reviews module in the manual.

If you are new to it, the original release post covers what the plugin does on the product page — verified-buyer reviews, photo uploads, helpful voting, the moderation queue, abuse reports, and the aggregateRating structured data that puts stars in search results. All of it stays on your own server, in your own database.