The ONLY reason this did not get a FIVE is due to the lack of documentation. However, the settings are very user friendly and pretty strait forward. The beautiful thing about this component is that it works in harmony with JoomSuite Analytics and JoomSuite Mail! Therefore, you can setup your user registration form to gather misc information, then send out a mailing with laser precision to people,... for example: in a particular age group, gender, state, registered, paid members or any combination thereof! And when used with JoomSuite Analytics, this can be one brutal info-gathering tool! Yes, I'm pleased.

I shall say that JoomSuite User is very good product. I prefer JoomSuite User component instead of Joomla own user management system.

Disadvantages of JoomSuite products are not related much with product itself, but with learning curve of products. I believe if JoomSuite will hire some user experience designers, then all JoomSuite products going to do a wow on the market.

For me seems, that behind the scenes of JoomSuite are more people oriented for functionality and programming, than user experience. I don’t like a product that’s requiring before usage to go through huge manual. Product itself shall teach me how to use it, because that’s a human nature - most successful learning is via actions. Partially JoomSuite products are easy to use, but some parts are not…

I really recommend JoomSuite products, but these are not for very dummy users yet. I hope they will get time to polish products to more dummy users experience in mind.

As a complete novice to all things Joomla I was delighted to find how quickly I could 'bolt-on' this extension to my site and configure it to my requirements, despite the lack of any documentation.

Basically, I wanted to 'capture' more data than the core Joomla registration offers (Age, Location, Occupation, etc.). I had this installed and configured in less than 30 minutes.

It also offers me a built in 'Captcha' component, statistics and more.

Fantastic! Best 19 euros I've ever spent.

I am fairly new to Joomla! 1.5 and very new to Joomsuite components. I agree with some of the other reviews. Installation and licensing is overly complex, but do-able with a little patience. Setting the component up is quite difficult, there are a huge amount of parameters in the various sections with no information whatsoever as to what is required. There is no documentation at all, a shortcoming which should be addressed with some urgency Beta or not. I think the potential is huge but I cannot rate the product any higher until I know what it can do and can make it do it.

These guys are doing some important work! I'm developing a new site with Joomla 1.5 and their suite of tools will help integrate the user database, content generation, blogging, the online store, and ultimately my forum too. Try going this any other way and you'll feel like your site is held together with rubber bands!

Now, the software is new and evolving. They protect with work with encoding (ion cube), but I think I would too as they've got a great product in the works here. If you're developing a site or need better integration on your existing site, keep checking with Joom Suite.

This might be a good component, but I don't think I'll ever know.

The entire licensing process is much more complicated than necessary. There is now a new automated function on the web site that's an improvement but it is still a pain.

You will also need to load Ioncube which is another pain. I use GoDaddy, a major hosting company, which did not have this installed so I had to go through that headache.

I finally got the thing installed but I still get these php errors. I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent more time, but I'm tired of the whole thing. A commercial component should be more user-friendly in my view.

When I first had trouble getting the license to work I sent an email to ask for a refund but never got a response. that was a couple months ago and I never followed up.

At this point I'd say buyer beware.

I think this component has potential. It's the only one around, as far as i know, that can do what I need.

It's not easy to install, partly because of some third part components that's needed, but when it's up and running it seems smooth, so far.

Support has been excellent. They've responded fairly quick and has even checked my installation and fixed it, when I got really stuck. (That was my mistake :-p )

I recommend this component, it should be excellent in time being.

Thumbs up

Morten Flaten

Regarding the other reviews here, let's not forget that this is a Beta product at the moment so there are going to be a few little bugs here and there.

With this in mind I downloaded the license manager and then the component, I had some problems installing the component so the people at JoomSuite took over and did it for me - within a very tight deadline I might add.

Once it was all installed correctly I was flying, the component does exactly what it says on the tin, and does it very, very well.

There are a couple of little things (already mentioned above), for example once you register there is no redirect so you're presented with the blank registration form again.

Also the documentation is a bit sparse, including the FAQs on the website, but I imagine by the time the commercial version arrives this will be up to scratch.

All in all I give this 4 out of 5, really as it's a Beta I should give it 5 out of 5 but I'm already using it for commercial purposes!

The installation is a bit cumbersome for the beta. However, my largest complaint is that there is no after registation redirection feature. And without access to the encrypted code, there is no way to fix it yourself. So the developers of this extension either need to fix it or give you access to the code in order to do your own hack. It's a rather simple hack, so what's the problem?

JoomSuite's support did email me back after awhile and explained the following: "Unfortunately, now it is not possible to redirect a new registered user to a different page but we plan to realize it. "

My question is When? Until that works, I won't purchase your product. I can't wait until August 1 to get access to the code when the commercial license will be available.

Although it shows good potential, in my experience, this is not YET a module for the casual user. Why?

1) You must first have ionCube running on your server. Installing ionCube (a third-party php add-on used to prevent modifying the source code) is not for the faint of heart and your host may not allow you to install it at all.

2) Next, you must install the author's license manager and then purchase and install a license file. You can get a 30-day trial license, but don't wait too long as getting the full license takes several days.

3)This is definitely BETA sofware (at least in the versions I tried) and there are definite bugs. The author releases code updates frequently, but my first attempt at an upgrade failed to install. I then tried to delete and re-install the new version, but the old version failed to fully uninstall and then the new one would not install either...leaving me without anything for user management and a corrupted mySQL database! As a result, I then had to spend several hours reverting my site to a backup. BE SURE YOU HAVE ONE AND KNOW HOW TO USE IT BEFORE TRYING THIS COMPONENT (but I guess that goes for all others as well.)

4) In my experience, tech support was slow to respond (a response to my first question took over a week) and there is little documentation on the author's site.

5) It is rather expensive (particularly in deflated US dollars...around $30!) and you have to pay again for updates after the first year.

6) The author does not provide a custom login modules (like what you get with CB). So, you have to get inside the php code and hack your own login module. Scant instructions are on the site, but I was unable to get the hack to work...and the author only tells you how to hack the registration link, not how to redirect the update my details and forgot username/password links. Unless you know your way around php code, you are left having to use menus links to access these functions rather than a log-in module.

With those caveats, the program (if I ever get it working again) is nice. Adding additional fields to the registration form is straightforward. However, unlike some of the more sophisticated form add-ins, there is no captua to prevent spamming...and there is no way to hide/show groups of fields based on entries (e.g., to ask certain groups of users to answer additional questions, for example). Unlike CB, there also doesn't seem to be a way to approve/disapprove users.

Overall, this component is still a significant, albeit pricey, improvement over the standard Joomla 1.5 user management and the author seems to be working hard on getting it stable. Furthermore, to my knowledge, there few alternatives currently. Community Builder is reportedly not yet working well with Joomla 1.5 either.

I am a php programmer so I know how a php code should be written, I was really impressed with the coding style, and scalibility of this component.