Definitions

Let us start with definitions

Listings - An enumeration of a set of items in the form of a list.

Listings are created to portray a product or service which you want to be made available for others to use and post their reviews on them, and see other's reviews. Listings can be anything like hotels, restaurants, shops, spas, softwares, electronics, boats, cars, humans basically anything you want to review.

Reviews - A review is an evaluation of a listing.

Review by the users of products / services show their experience with it, for this users are provided with some rateable criteria, and an option to comment on it.

Fields - A piece of information required to be gathered to hold a property of a listing or a review.

Crowdvox provides a number of fields that are used at the time of creating listings or adding reviews.

or listings the basic set of fields include following :

• Category - Indicates that to which set the listing belongs
  

• Title
  

• Description
  

• Tags - Kind of metadata that helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching
  

• Image(s)
  

However, if you want some additional sets of information to be included for listings as well as the reviews, that are specific to a product, product type, service, or service type, without having to recode the application, then you need to configure it.

The additional sets of information, clubbing together the individual head can be treated as a field group, and the individual head covered under each field group is a custom field or simply a field. While defining field group you can mainly set whether the group will be used for a listing or a review.

These field groups form the basis for creation of a listing type. Listing type serves as a bond between the field groups and rateable fields, and defines how a listing and its review would behave. Rateable fields as the name suggests help to rate the product/service, different rateable fields carry different weightages too.

Once listing types are defined, you can create categories of products/services for which the listings will be created. The categories can be hierarchical in structure, i.e. a category can have sub categories, and those sub categories can again have their own sub categories.

To understand these, let us take an example of a TV Store first:

In order to create a listing for a TV, you may want following fields to hold its information

• Display
  
• Screen size 
  
• Type (LED/LCD/CRT)  
  

• Picture
  
• Resolution 
  
• PiP  
  

• Audio
  
• Audio output 
  
• Stereo playback  
  

• Connectivity
  
• HDMI
  
• USB
  

Review fields in the case of a TV can be:

• Comments
  
• Do you recommend the product (Y/N)
  

And a reviewer to be able to rate them, can have the rateable fields for TV like:

• Picture Quality
  
• Sound Quality
  
• Reception Quality
  
• Value for money
  

From the above example you can guess that Display, and Picture etc are field groups for listings; and Comments and recommendable are field groups available for user at the time of reviewing product, and reviewer can rate the TV on the basis of its quality and value for money.

Moving On ...

Having discussed the pieces of information we want to create TV listings, let us start with creating the basis for all these.

In order to create listings for TVs, the steps would be

• Define field groups
  
• Define fields for individual field group
  
• Define listing types
  
• Define categories, and finally
  
• Define listings
  

Defining Fields Groups

2. Label for the group that should be shown with fields under it

3. Opt whether you want the label for the group to be displayed when fields under it are rendered

4. Using the Type field, you can set whether the field group is to be used for listing or review.

Defining Custom Fields

1. A unique Name that will be used to identify this field, and clarifies the purpose of its creation

2. Label for the field

3. Type of field, details on different types of fields are given below

4. Whether the field value would be Required to enter or not at the time of entering data for listing or review

5. Default value - the value to be shown by default at the time of creation of listing or review

6. Tooltip - a small message for the user entering data

7. Decide whether once entered at the time of adding a listing or a review, you would allow user to edit the data value for the field

8. Will this field and its value be shown on admin index?

9. Will this field be available as a advanced search criteria?

Available field types

Adding A Review Field

Here is a custom field that will be used to ask the user, whether he would recommend the product to others, please note that at the time of defining its field group the type should be set to

Review.

You can add options and arrange (sort by dragging) them when you are adding the fields of type: 

• Checkbox, 
  
• Checkboxes Group, 
  
• Multiple Choice Option Box, 
  
• Option Box, 
  
• Radio Button
  

Defining a Listing Type

Rateable fields

2. A unique Name that will be used to identify this rateable field, and clarifies the purpose of its creation

3. Whether the rateable field value would be Required to enter or not at the time of reviewing

4. Weightage that will be given to the value in this field at the time of rating the product / service

5. Tooltip - a small message for the user entering data

6. You can decide, which field groups will be used for this listing type.

7. You can select field groups of listing type, or

8. Of review type

Defining weight / priority of Rateable fields

Weightage can be used to specify weightage of a particular parameter. This will have effect on overall rating calculation.

For example - A hotel may have 2 rateable fields 'service' and 'ambiance', we can define 'service' to have double weightage than 'ambiance' by writing '2' in weightage field of service and '1' next to ambiance.

So, if we get 2 hotel listings with ratings:

Hotel 1: Service: 4 Ambience: 3

Hotel 2: Service: 3 Ambience: 4

Then, Hotel 1 would score better.

Defining Categories

1. Since categories can have hierarchical structure, you have an option to select the Parent Category for the category been created

2. A unique Name that will be used to identify this category, and clarifies the purpose of its creation

3. You can upload an Icon for the category that will be used with its name

4. Listing Type drop down here relates the category to a listing type, so that whenever a listing is created under this category, then the sets of fields can be populated on the basis of field groups associated with selected listing type.

Defining Listings

1. You start your listing creation by selecting one or more Categories (whether you would be able to select only one category or more, depends on the backed configuration) without selecting category(ies), you will not get a form to add listing's information, as the selection of category only decides which fields are to be shown for the new listing, depending upon related listing type, and ultimately the field groups of type listing.

All the fields that are part of field groups that were selected for the listing type Television, which in turn is associated with the category LED.

2. You can see the Picture is actually a field group that is of type listing and was selected at the time of creating listing type Television

3. Same is with display field group Listing's View

Adding a Review

1. Would you like to recommend this product is a custom field under Recommendation field group of type Review

2. Quality is a rateable field with weightage, hence the stars, and

3. So is the Value for money field

Till now we have created a few listings that belong to different categories, like LCD, LED, or CRT etc., but they all were having a common listing type i.e. TV.

Taking our example further, if we also want to include PCs in our store, so we may require a new listing type, say PC, which in contrast to our previous listing type TV will have features like:

• Processor
  
• Make 
  
• Cores 
  
• Speed 
  

• Memory
  
• Cache 
  
• Primary Memory 
  
• Secondary Storage 
  

• OS
  
• Family 
  
• Version 
  

and so on....

And we may have categories for PCs like:

• Desktops
  
• Laptops
  
• Tablets