JV-Relatives
This is a very easy to install and setup plugin that once setup, you will not have to touch again until another version is released with more visitor retention helping functionality.
In all honesty, it is a deceptively simple, but efficient plugin which list links to related articles based on Meta Keywords and you can chose how you want these links to be displayed.
The plugin automatically displays on all enabled sections and categories, so you don't need to remember to enter any special code on each page, it is all done for you automatically.
Installation
Install the plugin, enable it and that is it go directly to setup.
Setup/Settings
You can display the related link box in the upper left or right corner or in either of the bottom corners; or you could run it Joomla Views style, across the bottom with some of the intro text.
The plugin settings also let you set the width of the box, title, how many related links to display and where to grab them from (all sections, same section only or same category only).
You can pick the sorting criteria in nine different ways based on hits, creation date, modification date, article item id, article title or random.
Other settings include length of title text (to prevent wrapping) and if you want intro text along with the article title and if so, how much of the text to include.
Feature Set
The feature set is all in the settings; once it is installed and configured it grabs the meta tag in the current article the visitor is reading and according to your configuration will display links to related articles on your site.
I would like to see the ability to create special settings based on specific Sections/Categories and then a catchall for all the rest as right now you have one setting that will be used on all places that you have not specifically excluded in the plugin setup.
I would also like to see an ability to display more than one related box, maybe one in the upper left to display related articles in this category only and one in the lower right to display related articles in all sections.
Ease of Use
Just make sure you include descriptive meta keywords in your articles; if you use too many you will lose out on the usability of this plugin as it will pull in less related articles as well and too few keywords and there won't be any related articles to display at all.
Other than that, this plugin runs itself and we have seen visitor retention go from a 75% bounce rate to a bounce rate in the lower 50%, which means that before about every third visitor to Joomla Views left after the first page view but now every other visitor stays for 2 or more page views which means that our visitor retention rate is increasing.
We are currently running a custom coded rounded-corner version as opposed to the standard square boxes (see screenshots above); this custom-coded version was delivered to us within 12 hours of requesting this functionality by the guys at JV-Extensions. Now that is great customer support!
We have been told that the rounded-corners will end up in a later version of JV-Related and that they are working on adding some really interesting functionality to this great plugin.
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