I've been playing around with JXtended Magazine for the last couple months... Without a doubt it adds an amount of flexibility and customization that I previously thought impossible with Joomla...

Out of the box it's quite cool and still much more flexible than other options... However after digging for a while you start to realise all the weird and wonderful things you always wanted to do but couldn't are now possible...

Now having said that you aren't going to achieve spectacular results without a fair bit of coding knowledge... With time and effort though you can and will get results that are not possible with other components...

If you are trying to do something different with your site... Trying to get rid of that Joomla feel that so many sites have... Then Magazine gives you the flexibility to achieve that...

If you are a coder then you can't go past this... If not then it's still works well but could be prettier... Personally I wouldn't consider using anything else now and am rolling it out to site after site...

I'm still digging into this component, using it on a new e-magazine site soon to be launched. But so far, I really love it. Specifically, because I can assign articles to display in multiple sections and categories. It's very, very flexible.

Took me a while to understand the possibilities — it's so flexible that it can be confusing on how to start — but once you understand that Categories are not confined to specific Sections, and how to filter the interface properly, you can really do a lot.

I can have a single article grouped with other articles in multiple landing pages on my site. Any new articles I add are assigned relationships to sections and categories, and will appear in the landing pages in truncated form automatically.

On the down side, I had to hack in a "Read more" link for my articles, but I've posted my solution in the JXtended Magazine forum. Wasn't that hard, however.

It also has a lot of parameter options for displaying or hiding article information such as sub-titles, summaries, author, and much more.

As it's title implies, JXtended Magazine is a great component for e-magazine sites, but you'll probably need an experienced Joomla pro to do the layout customization. I had to do several things using layout overrides.

Have fun!

This is a very ambitious project that purports to add some much needed functionality to Joomla 1.5. However, the actual software is full of bugs, support is slow, and documentation is lacking. For $70, I expected a lot more. Hopefully, Joomla 1.6 will render this extension redundant.

It's well thought out, feature-rich and takes full advantage of the capabilities of Joomla 1.5. Using the Zine has enabled us to branch out in ways that Joomla core can't handle yet.

This product enables Joomla to much more with content than it currently can. I've used this product extensively on two well trafficked commercial sites. Its feature set is pretty massive.

We have implemented Magazine in our intranet environment (over 1,000 users) as a solution to display content in a number of different ways - easily. In this application frequently asked questions are created and categorised in one or many categories. This allows us to create a matrix giving access to our customers from one of a number of approaches.

Simply put it is a different way of thinking from the standard Joomla content model. It can take some time to get your head around but once you understand the different model you'll never look back. Creating menu links to interact with Magazine can be a bit tricky but the development team are active, professional and great to deal with!

I agree with the below review...while this magazine component is a great product, it needs more testing and functionality to really be a valued addition to your Joomla site.

Magazine is a wonderful product that makes up for a LOT of what Joomla is missing, and I was extremely eager to get my grubby hands on it.

However the current version is still what I would consider "beta" at best, with several bugs indicative of an incomplete testing process. I stand by my comment that this is a great add-on, but it's simply not done.

Something that's a little unclear upfront when you purchase the product is that it's subscription based; you pay a nominal annual fee if you continue to use it. There is nothing wrong with that model, but again - I'm a little troubled that my subscription includes product testing time during which I cannot use it in the way I had intended.

Third, JXtended Magazine is built "from the ground up" which means it is separate from the Joomla core. I didn't know what that meant until I tried to use other content modules with it - Magazine's incredibly robust nested categories do not work with any other third party (or core) modules dependent on section or category tags.

Finally, Magazine treats code snippets with a fair amount of disdain... if you were to embed a video file, for example, you have to perform some fairly major (to a non-programmer anyway) overhauls to the php and/or databases.

In summary, this is extremely well considered and well intended, but not quite as well thought through. As I've already paid for the first year I'm going to stick with it and see how it pans out, but for the immediate future I'll have to abandon it as a solution for our site, at least until the update is released.

Definitely one to watch, if not to buy... yet.

I just recently got this extension from the jxtended team, and I must say it is quickly becoming a favorite. I am a website designer with a lot of clients, but I wanted to find a way to expand my services to also include having articles released to my visitors that have tutorials, tips and tricks, and other announcments.

I didn't even think about using this magazine until I saw it, and when I installed it and started playing around, ideas threw themselves at me on how I could use this.

With endless possibilities, this extension is great for anyone and any project. The backend looks amazing and is easy to navigate, and the developers are friendly and fast at response time.

If you skip this, you're gonna miss out on a lot. The fee for the extension is well worth what you're getting!