I have been attempting to use MFMFTPPro for the last 8 months to manage a group of websites using the best practice of having a staging server from which periodic releases are pushed to multiple live sites. Unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that this software is not worth the trouble it causes, and I'm switching to manual processes of rsync-ing and database export/import. I'll explain more below.
If you read the glowing descriptions on here about MSMFTP/Pro by Elearningforce, as well as on their website, it appears that it's the ideal solution for my application. When I originally bought it, I was a newbie to Joomla, didn't know how to copy sites successfully, and was afraid of the error-prone manual processes that were required. In general, I try to avoid manual processes whenever possible, and why re-invent the wheel if a supposed expert has coded it up in a program? I'm a pretty intuitive guy, however, and their claims on here and on their website made me uncomfortable. They had a manipulative energy to them, using hyperbolic language ("INCREDIBLE!!") and generalizations ("...just for ordinary people...") Anyway, I ignored my intuition and bought.
The first thing I discovered is that MSMFTPPro is essentially only a site-copying program. I'd hoped that it would offer some sort of "views" in which I could take a master site and only copy certain selected aspects of it to each destination site, but it barely supports this, forcing you to list which tables or directories it shouldn't copy. If a directory or table contains data from more than one "view", you can't select the data you wish to copy. This limitation means that destination sites with different templates or slightly different content from the parent site will have to be manually administered after a move to make them unique.
Bringing MSMFTPPro up successfully wasn't an easy process. There are some challenging technical problems to solve around permissions in a multi-site, multi-homed environment - both on the database and file system sides. MSMFTPPro doesn't shield you from these issues, and you have to understand how to set up permissions on both the Linux filesystems as well as MySQL before the program runs successfully. These are not issues that the average newbie single-site administrator would have experience with. It took me weeks to overcome the obstacles, because the error messages are vague (“… cannot copy file…”) and the support I got was slow to be delivered, and not oriented around someone who didn't understand the underlying issues. I noticed that the support was delivered with an attitude of superiority or distance that seemed to be related to the you're-as-cool-as-you-are-smart attitude that pervades the open source developer community. It's fine for developers to evaluate each other this way, but in a vendor/client relationship, the focus should be on making the client productive, not having them walk a maze of problems and become an expert in the process. After all, I bought MSMFTPPro so that I wouldn't *have* to become an expert at copying sites!
Once MSMFTPPro was running successfully, the problems weren't over. I tend to tweak my development sites regularly, and then push them to the live sites infrequently. For one reason or another, the pushes would never work: there was always some sort of error. Some of the reasons were my fault: I’d forget how to use it after a month and make a trivial error in invoking the process. Also MSMFTPPro has bugs like not properly editing the copied configuration.php file so that the target site runs automatically, requiring hand editing. I'd forget this and spend time repeatedly figuring out what had gone wrong. At other times, changes in the files in my site would cause a push to fail that had worked before, due to permissions problems or transmission timeouts. Timeouts are a big problem for me, since I push from a staging server at home over DSL to my live server, and MSMFTPPro uses a very slow FTP protocol.
MSMFTPPro also uses FTP, which is universally considered to be insecure, easily hacked with password-guessing programs, and often blocked by ISPs. Because of this, my live site server has FTP blocked at the router level and I have to re-enable it each time to do an operation, something most ISP-hosted clients won't be able to do. I suggested to Elearningforce that they switch to scp, sftp, or rsync but they told me that nobody has problems with FTP. Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, since they only have clients that can use FTP! Other requests for improvements to MSMFTPPro that would allow it to really meet my needs have gone unanswered. It seems almost abandoned while Elearningforce keeps releasing new products.
I'm in the middle of moving my staging and live sites to a wonderful new server operating system I use to host customer's websites in my data cente,r called AppLogic, which creates a grid of self-healing virtual servers. But this necessitates moving the URL of my staging server, and Elearningforce doesn't allow that in their licensing. I asked for help almost a week ago with no answer.
Now, the latest problem is that I'm trying to copy my live site back to my staging server, since clients enter data on the live site through forums, etc. MSMFTPPro generates an error showing that it's trying and failing to copy my staging server to itself, complaining that it can't copy files that only exist on the staging server. This despite the confirmation that I'm copying the live site to the staging server, right on the screen. The error messages are completely unhelpful even in debug mode, so I’d have to rely on support again, but this time I have no time to wait since my project is on a tight timeline.
So, I'm giving up on the program. Between the fact that it doesn't fulfill my needs for distributing and maintaining multiple sites from a staging server, it uses an insecure protocol, the support is slow and attitudinal, and it never works right on the first try when I need it, I think that some scripted solutions will work better for me.
Note that I'm not saying that it's wrong for everyone - after all there are happy people in this and the MSMPro review list! And clearly some of the issues I experienced are the result of missing functionality best implemented in Joomla, especially object versioning and even conditional site replication, but this program won't solve them for you. But if your use model is similar to mine, and you have a business to run that can't take large project delays, I recommend you bite the bullet and start writing scripts. This isn't a vendor you can trust to be there for you when you need them as they seem more concerned with protecting themselves from loss than solving your problems.
Owner's reply:
Well, we cannot describe what ProFTP can not do. This is your opinion, which is partially your own fault and partially that ProFTP is just not what seems to fulfil your requirements.
I don't think that something not matching the requirement should lead to a negative review but rather a comment possible (because why would you buy it then) - but some people just tend to give more negative reviews.
And btw. ProFTP is installed on 2000+ servers and is a very popular component.
So I guess many customers disagree with you.
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