I am very good at controlling type 2 diabetes with diet but a bit of a dufus when it comes to Joomla and Joomla extensions. That doesn't stop me from trying lots of different components. I have a site to help type 2 diabetics learn how to control blood glucose with diet. I needed a good newsletter and auto responder to help people using my site understand the process and keep them abreast of new changes and new information on my site. New members and subscribers now get a series of emails that act as a structured series of lessons on controlling blood glucose.

I have found Acajoom Plus to be an outstanding component. I started with the Acajoom free component and it worked. Par for the course, I did manage to screw it up but with outstanding support from accajoom It was working.

After a short trial with the free acajoom I upgraded to Acajoom plus to be able to send a structured series of emails to new subscribers. I needed a lot of help and the acajoom team came through with outstanding support.

I wanted to be able to use all content on my site including static content and that was added in version 2.0.7. I was notified when this became available by acajoom.

over all I rate this component as excellent even though there are still three issues that I would like to see improved.

The first would be a good easy to install captcha for the subscription module to avoid spam bots. That is on their to do list and is promised for the future.

The unsubscribe link on my site is not functioning and I was told this is because of OpenSEF which I use for SEO purposes. The issue is in excluding it from OpenSEF which is a separate issue. I think it would be good if acajoom would work with SEF components.

The third issue for me was getting the auto responder working strictly from my server. The auto responder requires a cron to activate it. I was unable to get this working on a dedicated server but again that may be because of my lack of skills. Acajoom does maintain crons to activate the auto responder from their site but I would prefer to have this work completely independent on my own server just in case that service goes down for any reason. We have seen other components and services fade into oblivion.

Over all I love this component. It allows me quick easy newsletter generation and an easy way to collect double opt in emails for site updates. I have installed it on 4 of my sites and plan to install it on others. There are only two minor flaws I am finding and both are not preventing this from being a very useful component.

The first is it does not currently have a captcha or other means of filtering or discouraging the spammers. I am collecting lots of emails but few of them are following up with activating. This may be a good thing but pre-filtering, I think, would be better.

The second minor flaw may actually be with other components. I much prefer the JCE editor but with this particular component JCE is entering unusable code when I try to change the template for the activation and acceptance emails that are automatically generated. What comes with the component works but I find it a bit mundane and would like to be able to customize the welcome and activation emails to match the sites they are coming from. I really like the option of selecting articles that have already been written and added to the site. I would like to be able to also add articles that are with my podcast. Even though the podcast pages apear to be like other joomla news pages the podcast pages will not show in the emails where the others do. This is easily overcome by manually adding the podcast info and links.

Over all I really like this component and look forward to upgrades but there is nothing to stop people like me who are PHP challenged from using and benefiting from this component.

I wanted a foul language filter with features that were not publicaly available.This is light and quick loading and allows the webmaster to select not only the foul languge that will be screened but also who will be allowed to see it and who will not. Most language filters I have seen use a wide brush and either filter all or none. The killer feature in this one is it allows logged in users to see the unfiltered version while guests and search engines get a safer censored version.

I was in the market for a good subscription manager. I searched high and low and posted in several forums. Finally Sergey Romanov from http://joomlaequipment.com posted a response in one of the forums and I tried to contact him. Initially I was very skeptical based on all the post I had seen about developers wanting to sell their product and never hearing from them after the purchase. I am new at joomla and tend to mess things up so support is very important to me. Sergey and his JcontentSubscription has met all my expectations and my criteria for what the subscription manager had to do.

My criteria was:

The manager had to work with Joomla 1.0.11 / Community Builder / UHP2 / Remository / and the other components Modules and Mambots I have on my site and there are several.

I had to be able to offer free and paid subscriptions and a free trial subscription option.

Had to have good support.

Had to allow for different subscription time options.

Had to allow for different payment options.

Sergey’s JcontentSubscription has met all of my needs and his customer support has far exceeded my expectations. If you are looking for a good subscription manager I recommend him and his JcontentSubscription very highly.

The price was very reasonable $55 USD and he even installed it for me for a small fee. Initially there were some problems with the install and I was getting nervous. I thought I was stuck with a script that I had paid for and no clue how to fix it. Sergey fixed everything so it worked right. Sergey’s customer service is even better than his JcontentSubscription, which I am very pleased with. If there is any problem he makes it right. I probably even created some of the problems through my lack of knowledge.

Sergey, THANK YOU for this wonderful script.

The direct link to the JcontentSubscription is http://joomlaequipment.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7&Itemid=34

Now I need to tell him about the openSEF to fix that URL. I am also very pleased with the Open SEF which I installed and needed a lot of help with. Many of the developers could learn from these two.