What a year it's been! Since launching in July, our UGC app has generated over 2000 comments & reviews on Webflow sites. It's always been our mission to allow no-coders to do the unthinkable with Webflow, so it's truly surreal to think of the wide range of projects & use cases our tool has enabled with full design control in Webflow. Some of these include:

• Blog comments & reviews
• Ecommerce reviews
• Reviews communities (like a lite Goodreads or Letterboxd)
• Private communities
• Programmatic SEO directories
• Internal asynchronous chat
• Auction bidding

We have big things planned for the start of 2024 (more on this later), but the past few months have been focused on small improvements to our commenting & reviews features. Below are four you can add to your Supersparks content sections today.

Sync average rating & comment / reviews count into the CMS

It's now possible to sync average rating & total reviews / comment data into your Webflow CMS collections. This is useful for:

1) Showing the average rating & total reviews / comments for each CMS item in a collection list element, like Airbnb or Yelp or the below example.

2) Creating custom rating schemas for Webflow CMS or e-commerce pages. For example, showing the average rating on Google search results for recipes on a cooking blog.

This feature is now available in your sparks' settings. For more details on how to sync data and set up a schema for your blog, be sure to check out this tutorial. Please note, this feature is only available for CMS reviews & comments right now. But we will add e-commerce functionality in the coming month.

Content load more pagination

As the number of comments & reviews grow on our users' websites, we have become aware of the need to paginate to prevent an endless scroll of content. To address this, we have added an extra function for load more pagination. We are then planning to add traditional pagination with page numbers in Q1 of 2024.

To get started, simply go to the pagination extra function of your spark to switch on the setting. Then, select the amount of comments / reviews you would like to load, and paste our class into your load more button.

Show & hide replies

Speaking of pagination, it's now possible to implement Youtube style reply pagination, where visitors can show and hide replies for comments / reviews of their choosing. This extra function is now available as an extra function and comes pre-installed with our Goodreads clone.

⚠️ Optional reset interaction functions

The way our app magically enables interactions inside of dynamically created elements (like comments & reviews) can only be achieved in Webflow by resetting interactions. Previously, our app was resetting interactions on page load. But this was interfering with some sites' initial state interactions (in the first frame). So we implemented an extra function to prevent interactions from resetting on page load.

Many of our components come pre-installed with an interaction for showing & hiding the reply form inside the comment card. If you installed our app before November 15th and wanted to keep this interaction, but also noticed interference with other interactions, what you should do is the following: 1) switch off our new 'reset interactions on page load' setting; 1) copy and paste the 'supersparks-reset-interactions-{spark-id}' class to any element triggers (eg. the show reply form button). If your comment or reviews section doesn't have replies, ignore this.

If you installed our app past November 15th, you do not need to worry about disabling this setting.

What's next for 2024?

After reflecting on the feedback we have received and the wide range of use cases our app unlocks, we believe our app has the potential evolve beyond a commenting / reviews system and become the number 1 no-code tool for custom-designed online community & UGC Webflow sites. So imagine being able to create your own custom-designed forum or Circle style community in the Webflow Designer, without having to redirect users to another 3rd party software.

To see a sneak preview, check out this a rich text editor we developed using Webflow's new custom element, which will allow members to create new discussions as OPs. If you are interested in getting first access to our community feature, do not hesitate to get in touch with me at ian@supersparks.io.

This doesn't mean we will stop improving commenting & reviews. Below are some of the basic improvements we are planning to add in the first half of 2024:

• Upvoting
• Editing
• Numbered pagination
• More custom fields for members
• Admin & owner labeling
• Rich text
• & much more

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Thanks for reading and all of your support. Wishing you all a happy New Year 🤘!