I was debating as to whether I was going to create my personal website using Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5. While I new all the tricks to Joomla 1.0, integrating Simple Machines Forum is increasingly problematic with the death of the various bridge components and increased issues with the latest Joomla 1.0 versions. After some thought and after some testing last year in the early beta versions, I opted to load my first Joomla 1.5 stable install and immediately followed up with JFusion, connecting it to an existing SMF 2.0 Beta 3 Public forum I use primarily as a personal and business notepad as well as a client discussion and support forum. The complete operation took little more than 15 minutes.

While it was once easy to mass produce Joomla 1.0 clones loaded with content, it was always a great pain to integrate and hack the code to forum a bridge between Joomla 1.0 and SMF. With Joomla 1.5 and JFusion, the operation is very easy, requires no hacking of code and includes ample configuration options that were easy to navigate through with the integrated help notes.

Now, I'm that much closer to being hooked on Joomla 1.5. THANKS!

This component is essential for virtually every install of Joomla and is included in every site I produce, as it not only creates content, categories and sections, but it also applies them to menus, and for categories and sections, it does this allowing to create the menu items as a blog category or a list. Not only does it save a lot of time, especially for the development and maintenance of large sites, but it also assist in logical content structure. Thanks!

This is an outstanding improvement of the original version. The available module options has increased dramatically and logically, making easy work for those looking to add the flavor for a news portal to their site.

The greatest improvement to the management of news is the ability to offset the news articles in the secondary module, so that there is no redundancy, which would allow you to place a separate module between the two main news modules. An advertisement might work well for this method, but there are obviously other uses.

My recommendations would be to make the full story link text and header title default to nothing, which would eliminate having to remove those options every time the module is updated - for those who do not want any text whatsoever.

Also, the ability to handle CSS or text display from within each separate module displayed would be a great addition, since you no longer would have to utilize FTP and create separate CSS classes for each.

Thanks, again. Great work, Daniel.

I have migrated from JCE, which is bulky, often cumbersome and sometimes buggy. Nevertheless, JCE was still the best editor of its time, but with the FCKeditor making its debut, the title goes to FCKeditor.

This is in spite of FCKeditor not yet having a file manager, but it does boast an image manager upload utility, which is easier and more intuitive then JCE's offering, which is essentially a plugin. FCKeditor is simple to use and install and has a nice template system. Downloading, installing and putting it to use only took approximately three minutes tops. It is simply the best. Thanks.

Installed the component and module quickly and easily. The module must remain published upon all pages in order for comprehensive tracking to take place. I'm not a fan of the 16px X 16px icon the module produces, since it is intrusive, but I'm sure that can be dealt with in a number of ways, including by replacement of a blank. For now, I opted to publish in the debug module location so that it is out of the way. Immediately upon publishing the module, the stats began rolling in. The use of AJAX indeed allows for the page to populate in real-time before your very eyes. The site I'm testing it on generates approximately 35,000-40,000 unique visitors per month for over 500,000 page views. Joomlastats has been used several times because of its ease of use - minus a few bugs. But Joomlastats quickly generates a massive database and cannot be used because of this. While I'm sure Joomlawatch will also produce a large database, I'm anxious to see just how large that database will become when compared to Joomlastats. Either way, Joomlawatch appears far better because it installs easily and it uses AJAX. Some more time will tell whether its layout will work better than that of other options, including Joomlastats. It's unfortunate Joomla Extensions does not allow for multiple reviews from the same member.

Good work. Thanks for the introduction to Utterz. Any way to easily make use of the small button icon player? Thanks!

This is an excellent module that allows you to place a mini front page onto any page and every page, which is excellent for those who use other components such as Virtuemart as their front page.

This module actually looks cleaner, more compact and offer parameters that are essential to keeping the site looking clean and performing well amid the search engines. Text length parameters allow control of the look and feel, including the text length of the intro, which works well for content items that are too long or vary too much from others. This is not available in the Joomla Front Page Component, unfortunately, but it is here. It also has an easy-to-use and consistent-looking content thumbnail display capability, which is also configurable and can be set to maintain consistent size parameters regardless of the image size. The look and feel is handled through a simple CSS file.

About the only thing missing is a parameter to limit the length of the title. Otherwise, this is a great module that is working to replacing the need for my iJoomla News Portal installation.

This module leaves everything after the location it is published in blank. I tried it on several different pages and page types, but it does not work.

It is unbelievable how extensive and easy this component is to install and configure. It took only a handful of minutes to figure out how to use it. I was impressed with the extensive configuration parameters and the ease by which this is done through a component that allows you to preview changes prior to implementing them. It is amazing to fathom that this component is free and eliminates requirement of knowledge and time it takes to first configure CSS files and then create extensive menu IDs when manually creating menu links through Joomla for such components as Virtuemart, which could have hundreds or thousands of categories. This module could save hours or even days. About the only con I have seen in the 45 minutes I have used this free menu system is option for an expandable menu, which is referrenced below. Otherwise, I am quite surprised at how long this component has been around and the few views and reviews it has. I am curious how this menu performs under the eyes of search engines and load speed. The pro version has many more menu options and is priced reasonably for developers.

Good work. On my test site, though, this does not work with Open-SEF, which I view as the standard for Joomla SEF. Furthermore, the module bleeds into the header of modules beneath it.