Reviews & Ratings — social proof, on your server.
Add star ratings, written reviews, optional photo uploads, helpful voting, and abuse reporting to every product page. Verified-buyer mode restricts reviews to customers who actually bought the item. Full moderation queue in the admin. No third-party scripts, no review-platform fees, no shared data — your reviews stay in your database.
The reviews layer most stores end up renting — only yours.
Third-party review platforms hold your most valuable customer feedback hostage on their domain, syndicate it across their network, and charge monthly. The Solidshop Review plugin gives you the same UX — verified-buyer badges, photo reviews, helpful votes, moderation — with the data sitting in your own MySQL database.
Star ratings show on product cards throughout your listings, reviews appear inline on every product page, recent reviews surface in the admin dashboard widget, and the moderation queue lets you approve, reject, or mark as spam before anything goes live. Verified-buyer enforcement is a store-wide setting — gate reviews strictly to customers who placed an order, or open them up to anyone.
Every feature a real review system needs.
5-star ratings + written reviews
Customers pick a star count, leave a title and a body. The average rating and review count show on every product card in your listings, with the full per-star breakdown at the top of the product page.
Verified-buyer enforcement
Restrict reviews to customers whose own order actually contains that product — checked server-side, so the badge cannot be forged. Gate it further on a fulfillment status like Delivered and nobody reviews what they have not received yet.
Photo uploads
Verified buyers attach photos with their review. The file’s real content type is inspected server-side — not just its extension — and a size limit you set is enforced before anything is written to your own files directory.
Helpful voting
Signed-in shoppers vote on whether a review was helpful. Votes are stored in a dedicated table, one per shopper per review, so the list can be sorted by helpfulness instead of just by date.
Moderation queue
New reviews can land published or held for approval — a store-wide switch. Admins approve, reject, mark as spam, or edit from a dedicated queue, in bulk or one at a time.
Abuse reporting
Signed-in visitors can flag a review as spam, offensive, or fake. Reports collect in their own admin queue, stored against the review, so moderators can act on patterns rather than one-off complaints. One report per account per review, plus a per-account hourly ceiling, so nobody buries an honest review under a pile of flags.
CAPTCHA spam protection
Optional CAPTCHA on the review submission form, powered by Joomla's native captcha stack — works with any installed captcha plugin (reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, or the privacy-friendly self-hosted Altcha). Pick the one that fits your stance on tracking; the form handles the rest.
Order detail integration
In verified-buyer mode the review form lives on the customer’s own order detail page, with one small form per item they bought — the moment they are already thinking about the purchase.
Star ratings in search results
Approved reviews emit aggregateRating structured data — merged into
the existing Product JSON-LD node Solidshop already outputs, not a competing
second one. That is the markup search engines read before showing stars under your
listing.
Dashboard widget
Recent reviews surface in the Solidshop admin dashboard. Spot a 1-star review the day it lands — no extra notification setup required.
From submission to publication
What's inside.
| Extension type | Joomla package (pkg_solidshopreview) holding the Solidshop plugin plg_solidshop_review and the storefront module mod_sshop_reviews — one upload, one update stream |
|---|---|
| Compatibility | Joomla 6.x+ · PHP 8.4+ · Solidshop 1.3+ |
| Licence | GNU General Public License v3 |
| Integration points | Product page tab, product stats, product listing cards, order detail, account page, admin dashboard widget, and a recent-reviews module for any template position |
| Structured data | aggregateRating and recent reviews merged into Solidshop's existing Product JSON-LD node |
| Spam protection | Optional CAPTCHA on the review form via Joomla's native captcha stack — pick any installed plugin (reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Altcha) |
| Languages | 23 admin locales bundled |
| Update channel | 12 months of updates included; renew at 30% off thereafter |
Latest release
1.1.0
StableReviews now ship as a package: one download holds the plugin and a new storefront module. The package takes over the plugin's update stream, so an existing install is offered it through Joomla's own updater rather than a fresh download.
Added
- A Reviews module (
mod_sshop_reviews). Recent customer reviews as a grid of cards — star rating, title, review, who wrote it, when, a Verified buyer badge where the store can tie the review to an order, and a link to the product it is about. It is what a storefront usually calls "What customers say", built from real reviews instead of quotes typed into a Custom module.- Scope: every product, chosen categories, chosen products, or the product being viewed — the last turns the module into a reviews block for a product-page sidebar and shows nothing on other pages.
- Which reviews: a minimum rating (any / 3+ / 4+ / 5 only) and, on by default, only reviews with a comment — a rating with nothing written is a score, not something a shopper can read — and one review per product, so a row of cards reads as several customers rather than one chatty product. Ordered newest, highest rated, most helpful or random.
- Display: 1–4 columns (one on a narrow screen), a heading level for the review title, a character limit that cuts long reviews at the nearest word so the cards stay level, and a switch for each part of the card.
- Only reviews of products the visitor could open are shown: published, inside their publish window, under a published category, on an access level the visitor holds. Every card is a link, and one pointing at a page the shopper would be refused is worse than one card fewer.
- Every card comes from a single query however many are shown, so the module costs the same on a page of three as on a page of twenty. Its own stylesheet,
solidshop-reviews__*markup, dark mode and RTL; the Foundra template overrides it onto its testimonial block. - The module respects the same two switches the plugin's own surfaces do: it renders nothing while the plugin is disabled or Enable Reviews is off.
Changed
- The download is now
Solidshop_Review_v{version}.zip, a Joomla package holdingplg_solidshop_reviewandmod_sshop_reviews. The package owns the update server, so one notice refreshes both — a module shipped as a loose zip would carry no update stream of its own. The two can only be uninstalled together, because the module reads the tables the plugin's uninstall drops. - The minimum Solidshop version rises from 1.1.0 to 1.3.0 — the release that introduced the admin-model base class the review edit screen now loads its record through. It is checked once by the package, before either child is touched.
Fixed
- The review edit screen loaded its record twice. Joomla's form view asks the model for the form and then for the item, and building the form already loads the item — so the product name and store lookup, the linked order's reference lookup and the reviewer-email fallback each ran twice every time an admin opened a review. The model now loads the record once per request through the core's admin-model base class, which memoises it per primary key.
Requirements
- Joomla 6.0+, PHP 8.4+, and Solidshop 1.3.0 or later — enforced at install time.
Stop paying rent on your customers' opinions.
One purchase, every product page rated, every review stored on your server. Verified-buyer badges, helpful voting, photo uploads — no monthly review-platform invoice.