In this post I'll describe the latest 1.5 updates to Kemoku Reviews plugin, and a little about tables and grids. Let's start with generic updates.
Review Taxonomies
Now you can add Categories and Tags to your review pages. At first I didn't realize how useful they could be and was hesitant to add them, but many user requests and examples proved them very powerful. Not only do they add a lot of functionality to tables/grids, but they are also very useful to integrate with external plugins. I'll describe how they're used in tables below, just know that you can add them to your reviews the same way you'd add them to posts.
Child/Parent Reviews
Another simple addition that gives you an opportunity to organize your reviews in a very complex structure with ease. An interesting example of this is creating main reviews and nesting (child) reviews about the same company's different offers such as casinos, sports, poker etc. For example, you may create a review page yourwebsite.com/reviews/Company and have a generic company review there. Then you can create yourwebsite.com/reviews/Company/casino, yourwebsite.com/reviews/Company/sports, etc. and have more specific reviews and affiliate links.
Review Authors & Schema.org Markup
Since version 1.5.2 we have authors associated with each review. And with that, you can change review rating schema.org markup author to be a Person instead of an Organization and that person would be the review page author. You can change this from Kemoku Settings.
New Purple Color Theme
I added a new color theme - purple. I spent way too much time choosing those purple shades, so go ahead and give it a try.
Tables and Grids
Now about tables and grids, there have quite nice improvements there. Before you could only select reviews for tables/grids manually - choose whichever reviews you want, adjust style and terms options and display it. Now you have more options.
You can select a review category and all reviews in that category will be displayed. You can also set a limit, for example display 10 reviews in "Sports" category.
Besides categories, you can filter reviews by review tags as well. In difference to categories, you can select multiple tags. For example, display 12 reviews tagged "USA" and "Canada". You can combine those 2 together, for example display 10 reviews in "Sports" category tagged "USA" and "Canada".
This filtering and limiting fields give you powerful options to automate a lot of stuff and save some editing time. For example if you have a page for PayPal casinos, display a table filtered by PayPal tag and forget about it.
These new additions are available in "Reviews Table" and "Reviews Grid" blocks, as well as corresponding shortcodes, and the shortcode generator is updated to include these changes.
I'll be updating this post with all 1.5 release news, make sure to check back later to learn about changes and new additions.