It is a great component for multilingual sites, but if you don't have a translation for a page, google will penalize you with duplicate content.
The alternative they give you, is a plugin for Joomfish that costs 60 euros. You should be aware of that.

I install it, mess up an entire site. Tryed to uninstall it and I woke up with no access to admin. Had this error:
Warning: require_once(/components/com_joomfish/helpers/defines.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in administrator/modules/mod_translate/mod_translate.php on line 15

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'components/com_joomfish/helpers/defines.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in administrator/modules/mod_translate/mod_translate.php on line 15

the solution to this, without using a hopefully created backup, is to manually delete one more folder: administrator/modules/mod_translate. At least it worked for me. GL :)

I needed a website with multiple languages. The reviews where good so I went ahead and installed it.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it's been perfect. It's easy to use and has all you need to get a website in multiple languages.

Thank you so much for this. One of the best extensions I've used.

Sorry guys, I used to love the Joomfish when it was under 1.0 I had it on one of my sites and it is running just great!!!! Now I have another one in Joomla 1.5 and tried Joomfish thinking of premiere translation component. FORGET IT. Spent 45 min restoring my web site back to the origin stage when it was before I installed it. If you have SH404SEF installed as the SEF translation of URLs and now you want JOOMFISH, forget it. These two great components hate each other, there is no way you can bring back the web site unless you de-install it. I de-installed my favorite SH404SEF first thinking I would at least have bi-lingual site without SEF. Forget it, there is another issue which authors admit under Joomla 1.5. "It has become apparent that the Joomla caching system, which is based on files stored in the "/cache" directory, is not an ideal solution for Joomfish translation caching. It is too slow and can lead to large numbers of files being created which then cause the system to slow down as it works out which ones need deleting." No way you can figure out the patch yourself if you are a rookie like me. So after 1 hour of restoring my website I am finally left with plain web site and thinking to re-install the SH404SEF at least and think how to translate the web site... I guess English as default will do for now...
Best regards,
Alexander H.
Slovakia
PS don't take it as criticism, the component has still great potential and most of all is free, so I admire you for that, but please work with SH404SEF guys and program something working. Many thanks!

This was a great application before the team decided to found a kind of club to provide paying users with updates and let all the others wait about half a year longer for these. 'Simple users' have to wait very long for updates, more than a year longer than the 2.0 update was announced.

You can do that, but don't call it 'non-commercial' any more. What else could be a commercial product?

I was impressed with the reviews this has received. SO i thought i will give it a try.

I installed the component / module what ever it is...all ok...But my frontend of the website stopped working. So i decided to uninstall then my frontend website came back BUT my backend(admin) is now unaccessible.

In my opinion this is not as good as I thought. So I am now having to trouble getting my joomla reinstalled.

I am not going to install this ever again and use an alternative solution.

Great Component! Great Support Site.

After updating the site I also got the strange problem that I could not edit content at the front.

Looking for a solution, I found many topics with little response. last topics will direct you to a new plug-in as the solution.

This solution only cost you 120 dollar (oktober 2008) with upgrades for a year. So if there is a big upgrade after a year you can pay again.

The work for development shoot be paid but in reference of other paid components this is way too much, a specially without lifetime upgrades.

I've installed Joomla 1.5.7. After that I installed sh404sef. Everything was fine.
Then I installed JoomFish, cause I need to use three or more languages.
The combination of these two plugins creates a fatal error and the whole site is not running anymore.
Whene I switches off the sh404sef plugin, the website was showing the public-site again.

In the forums of both plugins, I've read a lot of reviews and questions about this problem.
I hope, the creators of JoomFish and sh404sef will help eachother to fix this problem.
Cause I think both plugins should be deliverd in the Joomla-standard-installation.

I started with the beta version and just upgraged to RC1.
Works perfectly. Very easy to use.

Perfect companion for Joomla 1.5

A must have.

I love the logic in which such a complex component is made. I never really needed any tutorials to get it working. Now it even don't slow down your server and it has a fallbacklanguage option ...

Thanks guys!

I use Joom!Fish on three sites - one published in 6 languages, two more published in 10 languages. All sites are using Joomla 1.5.6 and Joom!Fish 2.0.

Not only does this tool allow translating of all our articles, we translate all menu names and many other elements required for the site including custom graphics and videos that change with the language.

I have a team of 26 people involved from many countries with a wide range of technical abilities. Joom!Fish lets me give them appropriate access to create and publish translated articles easily. If they can use a word processor they can create translated articles with Joom!Fish.

The support from the development team is fast and they don't stop until your problem is solved. Supporting the development of this product with the Gold Membership was the best investment I could make for my sites.

If you need to publish your Joomla site in more than one language, get Joom!Fish now. Remember, this is the world wide web.

-a-

I've spent way too long trying to sort out a problem with an older (1.7) version of Joom!Fish on an older (1.0.13) version of Joomla. The problem was when I published the language selector to the front end, the site would be blank from the language selector onwards.

If the language selector was at the top of the page the whole page would be blank, if it was further down in the page, it would be blank from there. In the source, the code would just be blank from where the Joom!Fish langauge selector should appear.

Anyway, the fix for me was to change the permissions of the mambot/search and mambot/system and the files within to 755 or more open.

I always write pages in valid css2.1, but joom!fish disturbs it a little bit. To keep the site valid you have to delete one backslash in the mod_jflanguageselection.css, line 102. Otherwise everything works very well so far, some little bugs while deleting languages (error 500) but it´s ok for this version. keep goin`on.

Joom!Fish has been great on various sites I have done. It's amazing to be able to translate menu items and to be able to relate multiple-language versions of the same content item. In fact I am using that concept as the basis for some other in-house (non-Joomla) projects.

Some reviewers have mentioned that in multi-lingual sites it's important that for some languages you want different menu structures. I agree with that - for some sites I advise on we decide to have completely different menus for different languages, as they target different language audiences with different information. It can be a challenge to work out whether to use JoomFish to dynamically "translate" an existing menu, or just to make different articles in different languages, linked to from menu items in the relevant language.

Reviewers "mrs.marijke" and "visability" say they want to be able to hide menu items in some languages. Well one way to do this is with the MetaMod extension, which you can use to present an entirely different menu in a module position, depending on the selected front-end language. There's a comment on the MetaMod page on extensions.joomla.org with the setup required to do that (pretty trivial). Now admittedly that means setting up a completely parallel menu structure for each language - it's not just hiding or showing particular menu items. But it does provide flexibility in what you want to show for any given language. [Note - obviously this approach only works if your menus are in modules, and not hard-coded into your template, as many of the RocketTheme templates are].

In conclusion, I would say that Joom!Fish is an excellent but not the only way to approach translation of a web site. If you want to present pretty much identical information and site structure to different language audiences then it's ideal. If the information is to be different for different language audiences then you may need to be more creative, perhaps combining Joom!Fish with MetaMod to display different menus for different languages, or just making different pages in different languages.

Works just fine at my site! Thnx for this extension.

This package for joomla is the best solution for managing languages and translations of every thing on a joomla web-page.

Having read a few very bad reviews I was worried about even trying this component. As it turns out though it does everything I need and more. Menu items can all be translated so that the entire site is in the language of your choice.
Being able to turn a menu item on or off depending on the language would seem to be useful to many but for my simple site Joom!fish was ideal.
Thank you very much!

This extension has many troubles with Joomla 1.5.
I tryed JF 1.7 with Joomla 1.0.X it was working.

I love Joomfish! There are so many languages available and this extension is so flexible. I can recommend it to anyone. I am building a site for an international company. I am using joomfish 2.0 for Joomla 1.5 and it I am setting it up in english/dutch/french/romanian and chineze. No problems so far....
But I have the same problem which many other people have too I think, I have great problems with not being able to make the menu language dependent. I think allmost all sites that are set-up in a few languages need it.

So I am a bit stuck regarding that feature. Hope they have a sollution soon. Apart from that one of the best extensions!