Bikemagic’s member review system is a thumping great resource of product reviews from real riders just like you. But it had slightly become a victim of its own success and rather in need of a wash and brush-up. It’s not had one, though – instead there’s a whole new ground-up rewrite of the member review system, featuring a heap of changes that we hope will make the system easier to use (for you) and administer (for us).

So what’s new?

Category summary pages – Summary pages for categories show you an overview of all the different types of content we’ve got for a particular category or product, whether that’s user reviews by Bikemagic readers, forum threads, Bikemagic articles or items for sale in the secondhand section. This page highlights a few products from the entire category list. You can use the navigation bar at the top of the section to flick between content types.

Product summary pages – Summary pages for products show you the key information for that product, as well as how users have rated the product in different categories, extracts from the latest reviews, relevant forum threads and adverts and any relevant Bikemagic articles. From this page you can add your own review or read all the reviews by other Bikemagic members. You can use the navigation bar at the top of the section to flick between content types.

Secondhand – If a product is for sale in the secondhand section, then a ‘2nd hand’ link will appear in the navigation bar at the top and the ads will be displayed on the product summary page.

Archiving – This is a biggie. BM’s been around for quite a lot of years, and we’ve got member reviews going back most of them. As a result the system had got quite cluttered, but we can now archive old products so they don’t appear unless you specifically ask for them by changing the filter at the top of the product list from ‘Current products’ to ‘Full archive’. This’ll make it a lot easier to find the products you’re looking for. At least, it will once we’ve gone through the database archiving things…

Brand filter – If you only want to look at products from one brand in at category, say you only want to look at Specialized shoes, then go to the full list of products in the shoes category and use the brand filter to select just the one brand you’re interested in.

Product images on category lists – Where we have product images, you’ll now see small images of products displayed alongside the full list of products in a category. If you want to speed the page download time up then click the link at the top of the column to ‘hide images’.

New ratings – We can now have custom ratings for different categories of product, so for example jackets could be rated by waterproofness and breathability rather than the somewhat generic “performance”. We’ll be working our way through the categories setting up appropriate fields – keep your eyes open.

We’ve tested the system extensively already, but as with most complicated technical things there may well be a couple of bugs in there that we need to squash. If you see something not working as it should, or have any comments on the new set up for us then please let us know by posting on the forum thread at the end of this article. Thanks all and hope you like it!

See the new user reviews.