The functionality of this board is acceptable, but the ability to skin it and to make it look nice is a time consuming task. It's not the worst thing in the world, don't get me wrong. Out of the box though, there's a lot of "chartjunk" and duplicate user interface elements that can only be removed by hacking them out. Typical of open source software, the details aren't quite polished on this app. Other than that, it's an acceptable, though average piece of forum software.

This component has some nice modules available to it, has the ability to display recent image in a module elsewhere on the site, as well as other nice, simple features. Unfortunately it is difficult to reskin the included "hot or not" thermometer. It seems to work well, but it is not a simple task to reskin according to your site's design sensibilities.

This will integrate with UserExtended, and will allow you to display selected fields from your UserExtended list. Additionally, it will display information simply from other community information components.

The install and configuration was simple, and it worked as advertised. Users could submit FAQ questions to be approved by administrators, and those could later be automatically added to the site with the admin's answers. Worked well out of the box.

The template system of VirtueMart, is very, very poor. There are many instances of inline styles throughout the PHP, and if you really care about the layout of your site, you will find it very difficult to skin this application. CSS support for Virtuemart is also very poor, generally I found the included CSS styles to be fairly useless, while the really important visual items either had no CSS styles applied to them, had generic Joomla styles applied to them, or had inline CSS styles applied outside of the PHP template files. Additionally, the CSV import / export feature (one of the most important) is somewhat tricky to use in real world situations. I found myself poring over the CSV file to correct errors that were stopping up the import. Also, the CSV does not output orders that have been placed with the store. If you have accounting software, you'll need to hack, or manually input the order data yourself. On the positive site, the cart integrates nicely with Joomla, and the backend administration does as well. There is a good forum community, and many questions get answered in a hurry. Though a bit difficult to work with, the cart can be adjusted to a variety of purposes with a few days of hacking.

The identifiers for the various items required to create a form are rather vague, and it took some time before i could sort out how to make a form. Once I got the hang of it though, it became a rather simple affair. The ability to reuse groupings of form elements is an excellent option. Unfortunately, EVERY element has to be in a group to be included in your form, which hasn't been problematic yet, but I could forsee it being. The ability to choose to write to a database or not is also a plus. Overall, an excellent addition to my Joomla site. I only wish creating standard CGI forms could be this easy.

The bridge allows you to display Menalto's Gallery in your Joomla site. It doesn't allow you to administer it in any meaningful way through the backend. The integration of Joomla users without a hack is a great feature though

This is great for targeted headers, it's an excellent way to show users that they're in special sections, or just to provide a little change of scenery.

The standard modes worked fine for me out of the box. Unfortunately the smart mode did not work at all. The smart mode is intended to allow you to apply your headers to individual items, or across entire sections, rather than having to pic just one. You apply different header to sections, categories, content items, or item ids based on the naming convention, rather than applying to one single item. Unfortunately, this did not work for me. There is a debug mode, but it didn't tell me much that I didn't know, and the information it provided was not enough to track down the problem, or to submit anything other than a generic "this didn't work" bug report to the author. Not so smart after all.

Nice, but flawed. If it works for you, then you'll find it very nice addtion.

I installed this and it did not display any feed. The module displayed, but no feed information displayed. I didn't take the time to try to debug it, so I can't offer any hacks. Suffice to say that within 15 minutes it could not be made to work on my system.