Just downloaded and installed version 2.6 on Joomla 1.5.14. It installed quickly and worked flawlessly. Total time from install to a combined feed from 3 sources on my home page was about 5 minutes. CSS labeled properly so I was able to easily adjust the styling to exactly what I wanted. Highly recommend. Thank you so much for sharing the extension with the rest of us.

The module is good, and I got it working without too much trouble. It does exactly what it says, but it is missing 2 small improvements.

1. I'm not sure if I am the only one that notices this, but the actual RSS articles take a quite a long time to load, In most of my tests it took a minimum of 20 seconds before I saw the article. In some cases it was over 30 seconds.

2. The modal window shows the entire website, instead of just the article. Really doesn't make it feel like you are reading an RSS feed. It almost seems like you are looking at another website in an iframe.

Fix those 2 things, and then it will be a Great module.

Bad news first: It took a bit of a learning curve to get the modules (10 in my case) set up with my menus so that I could have 10 separate pages of feeds each with a different set of feeds on a particular topic.

Good news: There is a video tutorial on the basics of how to set the modules up (you need a new modules for each set of feeds). This along with your basic knowledge of how to create an article (to assign each mod to) and link the article to your menus, and you are off and running!

My big problem was the browser window was larger than my viewable screen size and I couldn't figure it out. So I put in a message on their support form and an admin gave me the answer in LESS THAN 2 HOURS! (FYI: It's on the bottom of the module Parameters section - duh to me!)

And your users never leave your site!

I'm Totally sold on this module.

Well it works and it's free so you can't complain too much but it does have some design issues.

Load the module, assign it a position, type in the rss feed URL address and refresh your page and it's there. A small list or table of contents of the various feed topics. So far so good.

The feed contents shows in 1 of two different ways:

1. If you activate mouseover tooltips the contents of the feed are displayed in a tooltip. very nice. Really nice actually. Except for two things. One the font size was really small and made it hard to read. Need to add an option to increase the tooltip font size. Two the news feeds I was reading had a lot of text. So much that the tooltip was about twice the height of the size of my monitor so the top half of the feed was always cut off.

To the author. Add http://www.aiononline.com/en/rss.xml to your feed list and see what I mean. Look at the feed titled 'Serious Fun: AION Voiceover localization' July 30th, 2009. What i recommend is for large feeds like that you allow the tooltip tex box to be wider so all the text can fit into the tooltip. Also make the font size bigger as well or at least the option for it.

2. If you click on the feed topic it opens up a browser window which you can set the size of it. The browser window just shows the entire website the news feed is being sent from. It's a bit slow to scroll around on and if the window is not large enough you may have to scroll around within that window to see the actual news feed. It would be best if you could just make the actual feed text the only thing in that window. Do that and it would be perfect.

Great idea, but for some reason I can't get the rss links to open in the modal window for any pages except the home page. Also, it would be nice if the modal window that did open resized to fit the viewers browser window... as of now since many of my users cannot see the "close" link, I've had to shorten the modal window.

I read over the other reviews and some issues, but decided to give it a try and see for myself. I installed the module as usual and enabled it in the admin panel, refreshed the page and I got the same error message about a problem with line 346 in Simplepie. So following previous examples I looked into Simplepie issue.( takes care of the feeds for joomla)(Joomla is using an outdated version that is not compatible with this module, as the module was built using the latest ver.)
For all who might not know how to fix this. Here is a step by step guide. 1) First go to http://simplepie.org/downloads/ and grab SimplePie1.13 2) Then setup your joomla installation to except the update. I logged into my joomla site through ftp in Dreamweamer but you can use any ftp program you like. Find the /Library dir then the simplepie folder- rename this folder to something else like simplepie-bak. 3) Create a new folder to replacing the old one and call it simplepie ( this is where you will be copying the new version.) 4) Now go to your downloaded file of Simplepie1.13 and unzip the archive to reveal the contents. 5) copy over the following "idn" folder "create.php" file and most importantly the "simplepie.inc" file & the readme.txt and license.txt. to the new simplepie folder you created 6) create a new folder called cache in the root of your Joomla installation if you do not already have one. 7) change the permissions on this folder to (755) to allow server writes. ( for me I right click on the folder and activate the permission dialogue box and input 755 in the window-your ftp program may be different, but instructions should be similar) Now refresh your page with the module activated and you should have a working rss-thick box viewer module-complete with tooltips and rss feeds displaying in a modal window (pop up shaded window via Mootools). This worked for me - instructions may vary slightly for you - but this should be straight forward for most Joomla users.
Great job--on this module, as it cleanly takes care of off-page issues with site visitors reading your feeds. As well all of the included settings make this a must have for displaying news in a left/right column or a whole page).

Just getting into the RSS scene for my site and it did not take me long to find this little gem, and it was the FIRST RSS module I even looked at.

I wanted something to show photo's from a feed, as well as introtext, a one liner link just wasn't doing it... This was EXACTLY what I was looking for! tooltips hovers show the photo from the feed, if no photo, then introtext - if that wasn't enough, links open a lightbox effect with set size over your site for better retention.

I have played with this for only about 10 minutes, installed the module, threw in the rss link - realized my news sections will now rock.

If you utilize RSS news feeds on your site, this is MANDATORY.

When I first installed the module, I receive a fatal error message about a problem with line 346 in simplepie. I download SimplePie 1.1, installed it and now the module works perfectly.

Great module. However, I can't get it to display pictures in my feed from Atom flick rss feed. That's the major download. Furthermore, pictures in the tooltip gets a placeholder but image disappears after that. Somehow it cleaned up the description, removing the pics even though I allowed images for both description and tooltip description.

An update by the author will be greatly appreciated!

Love this extension! Works perfectly! And it's the best idea I've seen for user retention with RSS on Joomla, too. I'm greatly looking forward to it's future development. Many thanks to developer Horst Lindlbauer and lbm-services.de !!! :D

Ideas for future versions:
+ Ability to set different options for each feed separately (eg: Turn on/off each feed image and/or title for each feed separately, as some RSS feeds have images that are too large and/or meaningless titles.)
+ Ability to replace each feed title and/or image with more appropriate images and meaningful titles.
+ CSS templates.
+ Template to manage several feeds within a small area (perhaps using tabs.)

Regards, NicMason

It does it's work, the available settings turned this mod exactly in what i was looking for.

Little warning though, not mod related but Thickbox+ (which is needed to run the mod) might give some issues in IE on some sites depending on the settings

Unless I have missed something. The News Feed works well, however when you try and open the feed link, it does not open on my site as the author Claims. Intead it Opens in a new browser window. There is a message saying that it requires thick-1.7 and Higher. However the Link goes back to the original file mod_thick_1.7 that I just downloaded.
Something is defintely missing. The Only good thing is the ability to remove RSS images and titles as one pleases. Other wise it would have been a an execellent module. At the end of the day it is no different from the Joomla Default. I give it thumbs down for false claims.

...the Thickbox+ effect does not work. I tried installing both the regular and Prototype versions of Thickbox+ and the articles still open in the parent window, taking users away from the site instead of leaving them with the stories open in front of the site window.

It pulls the RSS feed just fine...but I can't seem to get it to work as fully demonstrated. I posted on the forum for help 4 days ago with no response. I sent an e-mail to the developer yesterday. I don't expect an immediate response, however it just says that there is not a lot of support for this component.

Too bad, too. I wanted to give this an Excellent rating. :(

A fantastic module that does what it says - 1st time. We have used it in multiple module positions on the front-page, pulling multiple RSS feeds in.

Using thickbox means your visitor reads the RSS news of the other site - Without leaving users. Priceless for vistor retention.

I had a small annoyance with the way the tool-tip and the title collided. Contacted the dev - and an answer was received that evening with a solution.