I have been attempting to use MFMFTPPro for the last 8 months to manage a group of websites using the best practice of having a staging server from which periodic releases are pushed to multiple live sites. Unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that this software is not worth the trouble it causes, and I'm switching to manual processes of rsync-ing and database export/import. I'll explain more below.

If you read the glowing descriptions on here about MSMFTP/Pro by Elearningforce, as well as on their website, it appears that it's the ideal solution for my application. When I originally bought it, I was a newbie to Joomla, didn't know how to copy sites successfully, and was afraid of the error-prone manual processes that were required. In general, I try to avoid manual processes whenever possible, and why re-invent the wheel if a supposed expert has coded it up in a program? I'm a pretty intuitive guy, however, and their claims on here and on their website made me uncomfortable. They had a manipulative energy to them, using hyperbolic language ("INCREDIBLE!!") and generalizations ("...just for ordinary people...") Anyway, I ignored my intuition and bought.

The first thing I discovered is that MSMFTPPro is essentially only a site-copying program. I'd hoped that it would offer some sort of "views" in which I could take a master site and only copy certain selected aspects of it to each destination site, but it barely supports this, forcing you to list which tables or directories it shouldn't copy. If a directory or table contains data from more than one "view", you can't select the data you wish to copy. This limitation means that destination sites with different templates or slightly different content from the parent site will have to be manually administered after a move to make them unique.

Bringing MSMFTPPro up successfully wasn't an easy process. There are some challenging technical problems to solve around permissions in a multi-site, multi-homed environment - both on the database and file system sides. MSMFTPPro doesn't shield you from these issues, and you have to understand how to set up permissions on both the Linux filesystems as well as MySQL before the program runs successfully. These are not issues that the average newbie single-site administrator would have experience with. It took me weeks to overcome the obstacles, because the error messages are vague (“… cannot copy file…”) and the support I got was slow to be delivered, and not oriented around someone who didn't understand the underlying issues. I noticed that the support was delivered with an attitude of superiority or distance that seemed to be related to the you're-as-cool-as-you-are-smart attitude that pervades the open source developer community. It's fine for developers to evaluate each other this way, but in a vendor/client relationship, the focus should be on making the client productive, not having them walk a maze of problems and become an expert in the process. After all, I bought MSMFTPPro so that I wouldn't *have* to become an expert at copying sites!

Once MSMFTPPro was running successfully, the problems weren't over. I tend to tweak my development sites regularly, and then push them to the live sites infrequently. For one reason or another, the pushes would never work: there was always some sort of error. Some of the reasons were my fault: I’d forget how to use it after a month and make a trivial error in invoking the process. Also MSMFTPPro has bugs like not properly editing the copied configuration.php file so that the target site runs automatically, requiring hand editing. I'd forget this and spend time repeatedly figuring out what had gone wrong. At other times, changes in the files in my site would cause a push to fail that had worked before, due to permissions problems or transmission timeouts. Timeouts are a big problem for me, since I push from a staging server at home over DSL to my live server, and MSMFTPPro uses a very slow FTP protocol.

MSMFTPPro also uses FTP, which is universally considered to be insecure, easily hacked with password-guessing programs, and often blocked by ISPs. Because of this, my live site server has FTP blocked at the router level and I have to re-enable it each time to do an operation, something most ISP-hosted clients won't be able to do. I suggested to Elearningforce that they switch to scp, sftp, or rsync but they told me that nobody has problems with FTP. Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, since they only have clients that can use FTP! Other requests for improvements to MSMFTPPro that would allow it to really meet my needs have gone unanswered. It seems almost abandoned while Elearningforce keeps releasing new products.

I'm in the middle of moving my staging and live sites to a wonderful new server operating system I use to host customer's websites in my data cente,r called AppLogic, which creates a grid of self-healing virtual servers. But this necessitates moving the URL of my staging server, and Elearningforce doesn't allow that in their licensing. I asked for help almost a week ago with no answer.

Now, the latest problem is that I'm trying to copy my live site back to my staging server, since clients enter data on the live site through forums, etc. MSMFTPPro generates an error showing that it's trying and failing to copy my staging server to itself, complaining that it can't copy files that only exist on the staging server. This despite the confirmation that I'm copying the live site to the staging server, right on the screen. The error messages are completely unhelpful even in debug mode, so I’d have to rely on support again, but this time I have no time to wait since my project is on a tight timeline.

So, I'm giving up on the program. Between the fact that it doesn't fulfill my needs for distributing and maintaining multiple sites from a staging server, it uses an insecure protocol, the support is slow and attitudinal, and it never works right on the first try when I need it, I think that some scripted solutions will work better for me.

Note that I'm not saying that it's wrong for everyone - after all there are happy people in this and the MSMPro review list! And clearly some of the issues I experienced are the result of missing functionality best implemented in Joomla, especially object versioning and even conditional site replication, but this program won't solve them for you. But if your use model is similar to mine, and you have a business to run that can't take large project delays, I recommend you bite the bullet and start writing scripts. This isn't a vendor you can trust to be there for you when you need them as they seem more concerned with protecting themselves from loss than solving your problems.

I was able to edit one of the existing CSS themes and get my menus to work the way I wanted relatively easily. It helped to have information from the original developer at http://jscook.yuanheng.org/JSCookMenu/ Not being an expert at CSS, I had trouble with background images and icons like the other reviewers, but it's definitely possible if you edit the CSS themes (check out the Office 2003 theme). I also had some trouble customizing the themes to be cross-browser compatible (the long list of hacks to try are best left to the experts!) It would be great to have a few more options inside the module to customize the look of the menu items without advanced CSS skills, which are necessary in particular for cross-browser compatibility.

This extension is quite promising, but I wouldn't try to use it for production at this point. I really like the "views" approach this extension uses, as compared to actually copying the data to a different site, which the commercial multisite manager uses. However, in my installation, this plugin caused a number of things to break that make the site useless to me:
1) The call to the footer.php in the template fails and produces an error message on the web page, in which the footer.php includes directory wasn't ever put on the include path.
2) It breaks mambots I have installed: tagbot, jom_comment, etc. Error messages like this appear in the apache error file:

[Mon Feb 12 18:36:03 2007] [error] [client 172.16.1.71] File does not exist: /var/www/localhost/htdocs/joomla/components/com_joommsites/sites/dataconnect/mambots, referer: http://moon/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=1&Itemid=60

3) Joomla SEF works on my primary site, but not on the joommsites secondary site.
4) OpenSEF doesn't work anymore on either site.

I haven't been able to get any reply from the authors, there isn't a support forum, etc. I guess I'm going to have to go with the commercial tool.

Please don't take this as an indictment of the effort in general. If a support forum is added, and these path issues are fixed, I'd be enthusiastic about the plugin!

I have been running Joomblog for a few days now, and still don't really understand *what it's for*!

OK, back to basics: Joomla! is written to be a participatory/interactive Portal, right? Sure, you can use it as a personal home page, but it's overkill for that...
So, why would you use a Blogging component that could only support one Blog? Joomblog (unless I'm missing something obvious) allows multiple users to submit entries, but they all appear in one blog OR you can add a menu link to filter out just one user's submission. This menu link is added by default to that users's User Menu (whew.) But... if my site is to support multiple users, I don't want to have to manually add a link to a menu for each user's blog. And, the very nature of a blog is that it is a time-line stream of consciousness of ONE PERSON. So mixing the submissions makes no sense, unless you're wanting comments, which I'll get to below, but should be part of a separate set of functions for commenting.

So, while the features of Joomblog are nice, without some sort of user-blog index, it doesn't serve my needs at all. I'd do almost as well just using Joomla's blog-display feature with a section called Blogs and a Category manually made up for each user.

If I did this, then comments would work with !Joomlacomment. I tried to get Joomlacomment to work with Mamblog, including adding a new option to the preferences and adding some code that reproduced the database queries used to support other comment systems, but I couldn't get comments to appear in Mamblog with Joomlacomment. The best that I could get to happen was to get the PHP errors that appeared instead of comment links to go away, and an "Add Comments" link that did nothing to appear instead. I think there's a bug in Mamblog with respect to comments, but to explore it further, I'd have to install a "supported" comment system and I don't have time for that. I'm probably going to go for a commercial comment system anyway.

All that said, the code base for Mamblog looks pretty good, and the features that are there are implemented in a very nice way to use Joomla's content management, so I do hope it is improved over time. If you need a single blog, it can work well for you. In the meantime, I'm looking for another blog system...