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I've been using ZOO for the last 3 months now and must say it's the best component I've had the pleasure to use.
It's easy configurable, easy to understand and has a nice feel and look to it.

Very good extension, good design and very fast

I think ZOO it's probably one of the best extensions avaiable for Joomla! it's very powerfull and just work when you need a cck

When looking for a good blogging component for a client, I tried several that we attempts at blogging components. With YOOTheme ZOO, that gap has been filled. I've actually been slowly migrating several of my clients over to ZOO, even if they aren't blogging, simply because ZOO is clean, fast, and user friendly.

Get ZOO today.

First of all, zoo is very BEAUTIFUL component, but it has many bugs and drawbacks, but still it has great potential and plenty room for improvement.

However, main reason for "fair" rating is their AWFUL TERRIBLE support... Even for paid members... I'm not the only one claiming that, on every forum and topic concerned zoo you will find few people complaining about their support... I had personal expirience with that, I notified them about a obvious bug, and what they did ? Deleted my post... Getting answer was dumb thing to expect i guess... Really shame... It could be one of the best joomla components ever...

Thanks a lot for this nice Component for free !

i have made a Application with zoo for a gaming site. you can edit a lot oft things and you can build own templates on the scratch.

Thats nice...

Now the things - what i am Missing
in blog application - what comes free too - i have the big problem to sort anything in frontpage, because, there is no alphaindex search for the user. so i take a look in the manual on there site - but...

there is no documentation, how to include this function. There is only a text, what will tell you, that is no Way use it in Blog template.

Now i know, that is a lot of nice stuff for free, but it shouldt come with full informations about handling the code !


but all in all - i love this zoo extension. it is one of the best, i have seen last time.

so again, thank you very much for this component !
Kasi

We all know that Wordpress is better than joomla about the blog format, but with this extension that stay in the past. Excellent large part created by joomla.

Thank you very much

It's an excellent component, but made only average over-all by the poor support, even for the so-called professional version.

I would say that fewer than 20% of support questions get answered, terrible considering the high cost of the Professional component that I paid for. See the forum for more disgruntled users. It's a shame. I used to swear by YooTheme

This component a CCK creation tool has tremendous potential, setup is easy enough, graphically its looking very attractive, the only problems that i encountered is that front end submission is actually NOT completely working, for example uploading a gallery of images is still not possible which is a big handicap because users have to use photoshop to change the size of the images of the galleries and upload with an ftp client, additionally the support is simply put terrible. I really feel left in the cold after purchasing this component. We can only hope thing get better in 2011.

I had a look through all the joomla CCK's and found zoo to be the best. It's very flexible in terms of functionality and very elegant in design. Overall very impressed.

However from my personal experience the support is lacking. I've submitted created a couple of threads in the forum and commented on the documentation. My comments in the documentation are still awaiting moderation almost a month later. My two forum post weren't ever responded to. Even when i posted 3 follow ups to make my original post crystal clear. Honestly surprised and disappointed with the quality of support. Also I think the forum should be made public for SEO purposes. Also it's not a quality service that you should have to pay for IMO.

I have used zoo for a long time on my site. I started using zoo 1.0 and upgraded to zoo 2.0. They tried to make zoo 2.0 easier but i cant do simple things like display a raw field value.

Another thing. No multilingual support. YooTheme is based in Germany. How can they forget about German/English sites.

Support for free version is ZERO! I tried many many times to contact them. Including reading the documentation, leaving a comment there. My comment never got approved. I tried to leave a comment on their blog, also never approved. I tried to send them an e-mail and they never wrote back. Never! Not even to say, "you know, we only help you if you pay us".

I wanted to contribute and give ideas and hacks that will improve zoo. I feel sorry for the Zoo Component. It has a great potential but ZERO support from the developers.

Dear YooTheme make a public forum! Or change your license type because this is not Open Source ...

I had a very complex web site to set up that required a large number of nested categories, up to 3 or 4 levels deep. A very important requirement was the ability to add an item to more than one category at a time, in my case up to 10 categories for one item. Zoo handled this without issue.

Another great feature is, when creating a new data type, you do not have the notion of Joomla article fields and additional fields. You assemble your types out of a list of data elements and arrange them as you please.

Combined with the easy front end layouts, you put your custom fields wherever you like in what ever order you like (almost always without programming) they make short work out of customizing your views.

I value support and am happy to pay for it, especially with a component that plays such an important role on my website. Yootheme's support has been excellent and I am thankful that I have the option to buy it. A CCK without the option of paid support is too risky for me. I don't want to have to scratch and claw all of the web for hours or days to figure out if something is a bug or not and how to solve it.

Updates and new features arrive at a pretty consistent rate which also gives me great comfort. And, I feel that the Yootheme team WANT feedback and listen to it. I am a very satisfied, paying, customer.

I started with the Yoothemes to begin with 2-3 month ago. Templates are handy and addons are just exactly what I was looking for: Clean - rich features - nice addons - high code quality.
With the Addons (YooTools) it was possible and quite easy to create breathtaking websites.
It gives websites the "extra-kick" of clean design, rich features like social media, interaction etc.

After a while a signed up for Zoo to give it a try - and I must say it is an unbelievable framework!
Unbelievable in many ways. More I worked with more I loved it. It saves me tons of time.

Here are just a few pros of Zoo:
++ Structure: Very well structured framework covers almost everything you need to create sophisticated web solutions
++ Support: turn around time in case you have questions, support, problems -> outstanding. Within no time you get really great support
++ Quality: Code of Quality is excellent (W3C Compatibilty, SEO etc)
++ CC: Customer care in case you have recommendations / tips / needs for further release - the guys are listening to what you have to say and yout needs
(like with front end submission that was a missing part in earlier releases and is now part of the framework). And the way it was implemented: you have to love it.
++ Updates (very short cycles) in case of mootools updates / Joomla Update occure - framework is updated as well in no time (important for techies :-).


Three Recommendation in case you sign up for the subscription (and it is definetly worth every penny) i do have for you though:
1. Start with the Yoo Templates first - to understand the Yootools that come with it as well.
2. For Zoo: Make sure you read some of the docs and blogs to fully understand the power of the framework.
3. Definetly install the Solution WITH demo content (and adapt it to your needs) - because otherwise you will have a hard time to
start from scratch - and to make things work.

From my point of view this solution is outstanding and a pleasure to see its developing. Two thumbs up - more if I would have more :-).
No question Yootheme has a bright future - and you better
start now to become an earlier member, because there is no way around it.
Yoo + Zoo is something I do not want to miss in my "web-life" anymore.
Once you understood the framework and its power it puts you on another level of web development.

Zoo is simply Brilliant... easy to install, easy to use. There Blogging Tool is a great way to deploy a great blog, about to use there Directory Listing Application for another client. I love Zoo.

But most importantly YOO Theme who make it provide excellent support. They often go above and beyond to help out there customers.

So a fantastic product backed by a fantastic Team.

I deploy it to all the websites i develop. Would not be without it

I'm a avid user of YOOTheme products and I use ZOO on several sites. There are limitations, tho.
For instance,
After frontend submission in non-trusted mode, there is no admin notification of new submission, yet the article remains unpublished until approved by admin. This means admin needs to constantly be checking.
There is a coomets feature but, again, no admin notification of new comments
There is no way to limit the number of characters in textarea fields.
There is no way to submit a gallery in the frontend, even in trusted mode.
I know ZOO is currently under consideration for JED Editor's Pick, but I can honestly say that the current limitations should preclude it. In my opinion, ZOO was rushed into stable production in a cynical attempt to sell the companion Apps bundle, but truly, there are many features missing which are core to many other CCKs.

Easy to use. Easy to customize. Simply AWESOME!

I liked it at first, and began to work with it. I mean I planned all of my demands on it but it failed me because of it's poor db tables. It can't get any long text like 8000 words and when you go to your db manager you will see this message near the text field:
"Because of its length,
this field might not be editable "
Ohhhh, it failed me so terribly. A complete failure. I'm sorry. It could be great and maybe can yet. I hope I see the owner's answer.

I have been using the ZOO component for a couple of weeks now, and i must say, it is one of the better CCK components out there.

It has great usability both for creating content forms and for end users, however for the more advanced users it lacks alot of documentation.

The documentation provided is very basic, and even if you subscribe to a membership, the forum isnt much of a help either.

The general attitude is "look in the code and see for yourself", and i have the impression that the ZOO team members who are active in the forum are not developers but only end users.

To sum up, this component is great for the average user, but if you are a more advanced user, be prepared to read alot of lines of code to customize the component to fit your needs.

The only way I could be more impressed with Zoo is if the applications had more OOTB themes/styles to pick from (dark, etc). Other than that it is massively powerful. I built a new, fairly complex Zoo application from scratch following their documentation and had it live for my client in less than a week. Other quotes they got from developers were like 4-6 weeks dev time!!

I've been testing the front-end submission on the latest beta 2.1 release and it's outstanding!

Nice job Yoos!

Zoo 2.1 is the best CCK and the frontend submission is very nice looking. I tried Flexicontent and Jseblod, but think Zoo is much easier.

Zoo also comes with a free blog application, which is pretty nice!

It is even better than K2, although K2 has better third party support. But I am sure there will be the same support soon (for sh404sef, Xmap and so on ...)