At the time of my writing this, JS Content still has a fair number of bugs, and some functionality that is still to be implemented, but it has superb potential. It is *very* flexible, you can create content submission forms that have required fields so that a list view can be easily filtered. So your members can slice and dice the entries to easily find what they are looking for... You can have attached document fields, drop down fields, checkboxes, radio buttons etc etc. And it's all submitted as content articles.

As an added bonus, you can have parent categories and as many levels of child categories as you would like! So it lets you bypass the Section/Category limitation of the Core J! components. From some emails I've swapped with Sergey (lead developer) you will also be able to have a single content item show up in multiple categories, and they are working on a tag system.

The best part is that the team developing it is an actual *team* with an established product line and they are very responsive. I've gotten an email from Sergey in response to every Bug Report and Feature Request I've posted. He even reponded (with a sense of HUMOR!)with clarifications when I asked questions about his answers.

The documentation is sketchy at the moment, and some might consider that there is a slight language barrier for the N.A. crowd (though Sergey's english is quite good) but there are a couple of useful video tutorials, and they have brought on a .com veteran Program Manager (worked as a PM for Real Networks for 5 years, Amazon for another 2) to help out and they have a US based trainer that will be producing some professional tutorials for them.


All in all, we have been very impressed, the JoomSuite site is still a bit rough(they need a forum and some template debugging), and a couple of the products are still in development, but they have a *great* lineup of products and seem very *very* enthusiastic and talented. Good combination, great team, and some real vision behind the products they are producing. We're very happy customers and look forward to new versions and additional products with great anticipation.

Five stars plus from us, despite the encryption. So far (IMO)it's the best of breed tool for developing a complex site quickly, in many respects the capabilities offered are not just impressive, many of them are unique.

James and Susan

We totally love Highslide on our site, and I was quite disappointed to see everyone using lightbox (and derivatives) on most Joomla Implementations. Just downloaded and installed this extension and it's working perfectly. Everything that wants to use lightbox now uses Highslide instead... Excellent integration! Thank you very much, this will greatly increase the integration look and feel between our existing site and the new Joomla! 1.5 based section.

I'm still wrapping my head around the details of how it works, but the documentation was and continues to be very helpful in clarifying things. I've been looking for a DB driven form development tool like this, specifically to develop some collaboration solutions for our site, and this fits the need almost perfectly Better than Dreamweaver CS3 with a a suite of DB extensions (full set from Interakt, now Adobe Developer Toolkit) has.

I'm used to developing forms and applications in Remedy ARS (client/server DB RAD tool)and much of the concepts and functionality in Fabrik seem pretty straight forward with some nice shortcuts built in.

Rob (developer)was very responsive to my intitial questions on the forum, and willing to make reasonabl tweaks to accomodate new functionality required. The new version (2.0) while still being developed looks *very* nice and will be a great deal easier to expand/extend.

Hugh (support and Dev assitance)is a great community manager and good at helping keep things on track, even if he's prone to threatening cartoonish violence to keep things moving ;-).

My general impression is that this is *not* a pick it up as you go extension like many of them are. This is a serious development tool for those looking to build database and email driven forms and applications for their Joomla site. DO NOT skip the documentation/sample data and tutorials and expect to be able to accomplish anything. If you're willing to spend some time learning the tool, this one is a goldmine of possibilities and seems to have a bright future.

I think a lot of the folks that have provided lowish ratings expected something less complicated/powerful and easier to use. ::shrug:: Anyway... After looking for a solid year for something similar to Fabrik, I'm overjoyed to have found it, and the fact that it's a Joomla extension makes it even better!

James

We initially wanted to use Joomla a year ago, but our whole site is based around vBulletin 3.6.8 and we have substantial workflow driven by the vB profile fields and registration process. The previous duo-synch bridge was very flaky and left us feeling that we'd get stranded with a split site at the next upgrade of either side.

Fast forward to a couple days ago when I saw that J!1.5 was finally out and started looking at extensions. And I found JFusion, which is so *exactly* what we need it's amazing. Using the vB user tables as the authentication system for Joomla suits us perfectly, and it's a true testament to the greatly improved design of 1.5 that the switch over is as clean and surgical as it is!

We had a couple minor blips installing and getting JFusion running, but as it's still in Alpha, that's pretty freaking incredible. Not only does it WORK, but it works cleanly, and well! And it's still early days. Great extension with great potential and top notch support, the answers to just about everything I needed was in the forum.

JFusion *is* the reason we're back in the Joomla arena. 5 Stars + from us!

James