I finally got this going... after a few problems and lots of scanning of the forums... what I had was a common problem and a 'sticky' could easily have been created! The problem was that any users could add/delete events from the frontend (i.e. the Authority system wasn't working). JCal Pro has been fine on some servers (most, I suspect) and not on others, but I'm not sure if a fix is released. But their suggestion (found in a forum post) worked.

Some documentation would have been appreciated - once you've read the forums and got it going, well, yes, hindsight it s wonderful thing and it's straightforward enough. But a few simple instructions aren't too hard to write.

Still - once going - it's great!

Owner's reply:
Thanks for the note. Documentation is available here (and has been for some time).



http://dev.anything-digital.com/JCal-Client/Documentation.html

I am new to Joomla and a novice at much of this. I wanted a nice looking events calendar for my organization that was easy to set up. This wasn't it. Although it looked pretty nice (the fonts were way too small, though) I could find virtually no support or help with the little difficulties one faces when you install something new. Their only support is their forum, to which no one responds. I eventually gave up and installed something else. Unless you are a pro at Joomla extensions, I'd look elsewhere.

Owner's reply:
Sorry you had trouble, most do not with JCal. You are right however, we do not provide support. However, the forum has many solutions. A quick search usually solves most problems.

After a lot of muss and fuss trying to come up with a calendar solution that would work for me I finally tried JCal and I LOVE IT!!! (Insert additional exclamation points here!)

Installed seamlessly, configured easily and displays beautifully! And all in W3C compliant code! Is that a beautiful thing or what?

Left nothing out for my wish list for future features.

Can't recommend highly enough!

Keep up the good work, and thanks for making this beautiful component available so affordably!

Take care, all, and Happy Joomla-ing,
Tracy

I installed JCal Pro on Joomla 1.0.13 and it works fine. The interface and calendar functions are amongst the best I'd seen and it's easy to operate.

However, after two months using it, I noticed a sharp rise in the bandwidth usage on my site (from 1GB per month to almost 5GB per month). After investigation, the extra 4GB usage was entirely down to Googlebot hammering my JCal Pro component.
I've noticed a few others out there have had similar problems, but there doesn't seem to be a solution from the developers.

While I really like this component, I am not prepared to waste 4GB of bandwidth while Google continually indexes every page of the Calendar from 2008 to eternity. Therfore, it's now uninstalled!

Suggest you check your bandwidth usage after installing this component.

This is a great app. Nice looking, no errors, lots of features.
I would improve: customisation of front end (from back end: colours, font sizes) and support.
Also: if your site has change text size function the font size of the calendar won't change with it.

I've installed JCal Pro 1.5.1.2 on our church's Joomla website twice and both times it's created serious problems. The entire site locks up when the church's secretary is adding events to the calendar. Don't know why or how.

The last time this happened, about a week ago, logs showed that one of the processes used by JCal Pro ([/index.php?optioncom_jcalpro&Itemid3&extmodeday&date200])) was using well over 50% of the server's CPU resources and 7% of the available memory (almost 1 GB). This shut the entire server down almost continuously over a period of several hours until JCal Pro was removed from the system. We've had no problems since then.

On the positive side, JCal Pro is a snap to set up and really looks great. I just wish I could trust it to work properly and not lock the system.

Owner's reply:
You are using an obsolete version. I recommend an upgrade to the latest stable version.

JCal does exactly what the authors say. No problems installing and no configuration needed to function properly when installed. Beautiful interface and easy to configure.

Like so many such calendars, you can never please all of the people all of the time, and I'm very aware of that in writing this review. I downloaded it primarily for use on a church website where it would hopefully show weekly services and club meetings etc. Initially I thought it was going to suffice for all our needs, but the more I play with it the more I realise it isn't as yet. Our weekly services obviously change in content but there are some elements that would be standard each week. On our old site using an Access driven calendar I could copy the standard info across as many weeks as I desired (albeit manually which was slow work), but then all I had to do each week would be to update it with the specific info for that week. With JCal I can't utilise the repeat event because it repeats the entire information for any one week across all of them, so the only option is to then do every week separately which is ok but would have been nice to have more options on the repeat event. I would just have preferred for more than 1 weeks worth of services to show on the main calendar otherwise it wouldn't be an issue. Plus (unless I'm mistaken) I can't find any way of making a particular view e.g. Monthly, as mandatory - while again it's great for the user to have the various options offered to them, some people wouldn't see that menu and thus think what they were seeing (the weekly?) was the only view available and maybe miss meetings as a result. Again, our older calendar always and only showed a monthly view which was really helpful. Small points and very specific to our own requirements, but would be nice if yet more flexibility could perhaps be built in on future updates? Overall tho - definitely one of the best around.

I went with JCal Pro but it was a mistake. To be clear, I am using 1.5.3 Stable with Joomla 1.0.12. Here are TWO MAIN PROBLEMS, (there are more, but these are the ones that really matter):

- Scheduling is highly inflexible. When you say repeat monthly, it thinks you want it to repeat on the same day of every month... when in reality nothing ever works that way. What you really mean is you want it to repeat on the first Monday of every month or something like that.

- Highly inefficient code. I entered all my events in and it slows down to a crawl when pulling up the monthly calendar. When I looked into the code it was a total mess. It was making 31 separate sql queries (sometimes more) in order to build the calendar. Also, for repeating events, it cycles through EVERY SINGLE EVENT to see if there is a repetition that falls on the current day. It might be a good calendar if you had 4 or 5 events a month, but not if you have more than 20.

Stay away from this product, go with JEvents instead. So far I'm really satisfied with JEvents.

Owner's reply:
We have an efficiency build planned for JCal Pro. Those queries remain from the original standalone extcal. That said, I routinely use this for busy calendars and page-loads are fine. You might consider trying the speed on localhost or another server to test the speed.

Just throwed away 5 bucks. This component is very good to see but it's almost useless due to the extremely slow response. Got many many timeout errors.

To be honest i was a little scared about paying something for a module / component without testing it within my own websites.

Okay it was only $5,00 but when you have experiences in the past with these kind of things, and feel very bad after you bought something, and the result was dissapointing, you will be scared forever ;-)

I took the risk of buying this module/component and YES this is REALLY GREAT / AWESOME !!

Very much thanks to the developers !!

And it's exactly what I needed for my site.
The look is great and realy profecional.

I was sad to the see ExtCalendar turn into the subscription-based JCal Pro - but in fairness - JCal Pro is very well-developed, and they aren't asking for much (currently $5).

The Calendar has a nice 'category' system and modules for listing events, and is great and easy-to-use for basic non-techie site administrators.

Good Calender - a couple more visual styles would be useful though, as it has a default design that will not work for all sites.

I love this calendar. Validates, nice design and easy to use.
BUT the JcalPro makes Google bot to go crazy when spidering my website trying to index the website content.

I have tried to disable the JcalPro in my robots.txt file, but I simply cannot stop this.

I have not found any places to disable linking in JcalPro or to prevent this trap.

It produces thousands of duplicated indexed files in google.
Each day - until 2008 is indexed!!

How do I fix this?My robot txt file has this parameter:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*com_jcalpro
Disallow: /*com_jcalpro*
Disallow: /jcalpro/

Regards datatrond

I've had great luck, so far, with the JCal component and modules. Easy installation and seamless transfer of events from ExtCal. The one odd thing that I can't seem to correct is that all events are listed with "MDT" following the date/time of the event, despite the fact that the time zone is set correctly in the admin back-end (Eastern Time). If I use a 24-hour option, no problem, but the 12-hour option results in something like this: "Date: Saturday, July 07, 2007 At 8:00:00 Am MDT".
I'd also like an option for a simple, default text editor, rather than providing the more robust editors for entering event information (stuff like "insert image" confuses the operation).
Minor quibbles, though. All in all, JCal is a fine component, and many thanks to the creators.