When I first read about and installed this component, I was leary. I had a feeling it would be labor intensive, hard to administer, and too complex for the average site visitors I was targeting.

SOBI2 installed like a dream into my 1.5 site, and customizing the configuration, fields, etc., was almost too easy. I had to back up and simplify my categories because it made it too easy to go category/subcategory crazy!

My only wish is that the price of the plugins wasn't so far out of reach. I'd love to add in a couple of them, but I design mostly for non-profits and the NPO using the directory just doesn't have the funds for them.

Overall, though, I would recommend SOBI2 to anyone developing a joomla-based site regardless of how new or experienced you are. SOBI2 is definitely dummie-proof!

I put JCalPro on a church website, a non-profit website, and am about to install it on a news portal for another non-profit to use as a community events calendar. I love the way it installed with ease and it's basically simple to use in it's basic form.

I'd like to see more flexibility in entering recurring date events. In all three instances where I am/will be using it, there are occassions to enter events that happen on the XX weekday of the month (Example - 1st Saturday each month). I can't get it to let me do that, and have to hand enter the event each time.

Integration would be great, too, from a news portal viewpoint. For instance if you're writing an article that has multiple events listed in it, being able to add those events to the calendar without finishing the article THEN going to the JCal component and same way on the JCal end. You're entering an event that inspires an article.

All things considered, though, this is a good extension for just about any application

I read the other reviews on ChronoForms and chose this one based on them. It installed without problem. I would say it probably works fine. Unfortunately, I have very little skill in designing and writing forms, and there is no guidance for "newbies." Since Joomla is so readily available through Fantastico (I learned about joomla by exploring the fantastico button on my cPanel) and since "citizen journalism" is a growing trend, I would say there are more newbies out here today than ever. We need something easier to operate.

Talk about easy to install and use. We're running a joomla site with iJoomla Magazine to power an online news publication. Ultimate AJAX Newsflash is letting us get critical information to each page without overloading user resources. We don't do pay-per-click advertising, so we were able to use it to increase visibility of our advertisers without adding a billion more boxes to each page. We had a very slight learning curve in setting it up and finally set a fixed size for the box it comes up in. It's just simply a great extension. Thanks, Joomlaworks

I have to say I love opportunities to use GMaps, especially if it's more creative than mapping someone's business, and the tech support for this product is phenomenal. The toughest thing I've had to do with it was learn where the best sites were for converting addresses into latitude and longitude! Thank you, Chris. Sorry it took so long for me to get over here and say this to you and for you. This is a great mod.

This is such an easy to install, easy to use extension and adds such a professional quality to a site! We're using it on an online news publication and it literally makes us look like the big news sites. I'm anxious to see some more skins come out for it (I don't know the coding well enough to tackle developing my own skins), would love to see it have some image resizing options, and need to figure out how to make it section specific, but this is just truly an awesome extension well worth the investment!