The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

Overall I thought this was a pretty good product. Coding wise and ease of use seem near perfect. It's solid, easy to setup and easy to manage.

I don't like that it's damn near impossible to customize the look/layout - and almost no real themes for it. But for $20 - you can't beat it.

If you need a calendar, this is the one. I had nothing but problems with JEvents, but JCal Pro was a breeze and continues to work near perfect.

The features of this calendar are some minimal compared to JEvents, which is free. I would expect a feature rich application if I have to pay for it.

Used calendar on kid's basketball team site
So easy to create different set of calendar view's for specific basketball teams.
Just need more themes, which I subscribe to as well.

Thank you for your other plugins as well, which are all great use of joomla code.

Unfortunately, I've subscribed to Jcal pro 1.5.8 (build 373), wish was confirmed as a non-working version (problems with dates, etc); I didn't had access to the forum before subscribing to the service (or at least I wasn't aware of this bug). So, I subscribed to a non-working version (that developers were confirming on the forum);

One sugestion, since there's posts that confirm these bugs (developers were aware of it); Please, don't let people subscribe to a service that they cant use.

We used JEvents on Joomla 1.0, and made a site decision when we upgraded to Joomla 1.5 to not enable legacy support, so we started looking for a new calendar for Joomla 1.5.

We started with event list, which seems to have decent community support, and was free, but we didn't like the way it did reoccuring events, or archiving, so we kept looking.

JCal Pro was a great value. The 48 hour subscription is chump change, (I pulled it out of pocket rather than fill out the paperwork for and the software works perfectly. We'll sign up for a more extensive subscription in a heartbeat if we have any trouble with it.

Minor bug: End dates for reoccuring events in the front end must be set before 2022 or else a bug occurs in the back end.

Feature missing: no support for reoccuring event exceptions (not that EventList or JEvents supported that either, just something we could really use.)

At the time I write this, JCal Pro's version for the Joomla! 1.5 compatible release is 1.5.9 RC. Note the RC, it means "Release Candidate." This means that the extension, while it works in version 1.5 is not a final, stable release but rather still in development. Despite this, however, I'm impressed at how well it works overall and how consistently the developer responds to problems, even if it's only to let you know that he's aware of them.

I mention this both because I've been very satisfied at how usable JCal Pro has continued to be despite its pre-release status, and in light of the possibility that others might notice reviews complaining of bugs in this or prior pre-release versions.

There have been a couple of problems, and they have been frustrating at the time. But hey, that's the risk of beta and other pre-release software and--quite honestly--they are to be expected, which is why the developer warns people to think twice before deploying a pre-release version of the extension to a production site.

The simple truth is, in my opinion this is currently the best calendar available for Joomla and I'm excited about the fact that it's now out of the beta stages and into the release candidate cycle, because the only thing keeping me from using it everywhere I can (everywhere it fits) is its production-ready status.

Kudos to the dev for an awesome product.

Jcal Pro is so good that up until today, I've never had a reason to contact them. However, I did today and received a response within MINUTES!

Just an FYI - the issue was that the Quantcast mambot was causing a conflict so once it was uninstalled, all was well.

What could be worse than a calendar that doesn't work? One that does work, but gets the dates wrong, that's what. This product SHOULD be great - everything is there and well thought-out.

I bought the 48hour subscription, downloaded the product, found that it posted ALL events ONE DAY LATER THAN THE ACTUAL RECORDED DATE, even though the date on the record says the 14th, it will display on the 15th. I went to the forum with my problem and found that everyone, including the developers were aware of it, and yet continued to sell the subscriptions.

In version 1.5.7 RC (J1.5), there are too many unresolved bugs. (permissions and so). It is not possible to use JCal with Joomla 1.5 at this time.
The developers give no assistance, only forum. Of course, it is impossible to resolve the critical failures.

I have this extension installed, and it looks very nice. However, the number og mysql queries it evaluates is massive. A default Joomla installation evaluates about 15 queries on each page. With Jcal installed, this number jumps to about 115.

Summing up, the developers should prioritize code efficiency, and they have for a long time promised a 'efficiency extension', but this have never materialized. UI is very nice, and when the developers improve their code, this will be the only calendar you need.

This package gives me exactly what I need:

--display of the next event in a recurring series

--display of non-recurring events

--shown in a sidebar, and in a variety of page formats.

--a way for end users to add events.

It's a terrific addition to my web site.

It worked fine in J! 1.5. I had to turn on legacy mode to get the calender and latest events modules to work. With legacy mode on, the search mambot also works, but doesn't offer a checkbox to select only event search. So, I'm looking forward to 1.5 support being completed.

I'd ask for some changes in the interface that posts events:

-- settable default event length.

-- an easier way to choose dates and times than pulldown menues.

This calendar has been a favourite of ours for quite some time now... It's simple, elegant and easy to moderate and maintain.

*Looking forward to JCAL Server with baited breath!!!! :)

Known bugs and no resolution resulting in blank pages. According to developers "Yes, there are likely to be many unresolved bugs for 1.5.x. Look for additional versions soon."

No problems installing or implementing the calendar. It does have one major limitation, IMO. Though it offers a flat view (ie list of events) it only shows events for the month being viewed. Therefore, if you're near the end of the month and have an important event coming up the following week (which falls in the next month) it simply doesn't show unless the user chooses to click on the next month. And from replies by the admin of their forum, it would be a major endeavor to hack the code to change this. So for site that have infrequent events scheduled in the calendar, this poses a problem.

There is a module and a bot that lists latest events regardless of month, so that can be done in a side bar. But if you want to have a link from the menu to the component, you end up with the problem above.

Otherwise, if you have frequent events, seems like a good enough calendar.

I finally got this going... after a few problems and lots of scanning of the forums... what I had was a common problem and a 'sticky' could easily have been created! The problem was that any users could add/delete events from the frontend (i.e. the Authority system wasn't working). JCal Pro has been fine on some servers (most, I suspect) and not on others, but I'm not sure if a fix is released. But their suggestion (found in a forum post) worked.

Some documentation would have been appreciated - once you've read the forums and got it going, well, yes, hindsight it s wonderful thing and it's straightforward enough. But a few simple instructions aren't too hard to write.

Still - once going - it's great!

After a lot of muss and fuss trying to come up with a calendar solution that would work for me I finally tried JCal and I LOVE IT!!! (Insert additional exclamation points here!)

Installed seamlessly, configured easily and displays beautifully! And all in W3C compliant code! Is that a beautiful thing or what?

Left nothing out for my wish list for future features.

Can't recommend highly enough!

Keep up the good work, and thanks for making this beautiful component available so affordably!

Take care, all, and Happy Joomla-ing,
Tracy

I installed JCal Pro on Joomla 1.0.13 and it works fine. The interface and calendar functions are amongst the best I'd seen and it's easy to operate.

However, after two months using it, I noticed a sharp rise in the bandwidth usage on my site (from 1GB per month to almost 5GB per month). After investigation, the extra 4GB usage was entirely down to Googlebot hammering my JCal Pro component.
I've noticed a few others out there have had similar problems, but there doesn't seem to be a solution from the developers.

While I really like this component, I am not prepared to waste 4GB of bandwidth while Google continually indexes every page of the Calendar from 2008 to eternity. Therfore, it's now uninstalled!

Suggest you check your bandwidth usage after installing this component.

This is a great app. Nice looking, no errors, lots of features.
I would improve: customisation of front end (from back end: colours, font sizes) and support.
Also: if your site has change text size function the font size of the calendar won't change with it.

I've installed JCal Pro 1.5.1.2 on our church's Joomla website twice and both times it's created serious problems. The entire site locks up when the church's secretary is adding events to the calendar. Don't know why or how.

The last time this happened, about a week ago, logs showed that one of the processes used by JCal Pro ([/index.php?optioncom_jcalpro&Itemid3&extmodeday&date200])) was using well over 50% of the server's CPU resources and 7% of the available memory (almost 1 GB). This shut the entire server down almost continuously over a period of several hours until JCal Pro was removed from the system. We've had no problems since then.

On the positive side, JCal Pro is a snap to set up and really looks great. I just wish I could trust it to work properly and not lock the system.

JCal does exactly what the authors say. No problems installing and no configuration needed to function properly when installed. Beautiful interface and easy to configure.