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After playing around with Jomsocial for a week I was able to grasp all of the possibilities and limitations. My biggest point of frustration and the reason for not using platform was the complete absence of any kind of photo album organization. Any album grouping or categorization is simply absent. Period. Once you upload a twenty or so albums they just get accumulated in single page in order of last edited but otherwise without any way of organizing them. I looked for extensions that would categorize albums but found nothing. Videos, on other hand have a categorization/grouping feature that works well. Another feature that would I really needed was a way for the user to have more tangible relationships with each other such as siblings listing, "married to...", or "in relationship with...". This feature or extension making it possible is absent as well. Otherwise this plugin provides a good stripped-down fairly easy to operate and understand version of the Facebook. Perfect and works for the most basic social networking, but forget trying to tailor it to your slightly more sophisticated needs.

After having a horrible horrible time with community builder i decided to take the plunge and purchase jomsocial.

IM GLAD I DID

Not only did i have a basic community up and running within seconds (and i mean seconds) there is so much flexabiity available for jomsocial its incredable.

Support can be a little slow - but they acknowledge that however they DO respond.

My Advice, if your looking for a social networking solution take the plunge and purchase jomsocial.

The others like CB just dont cut the mustard.

I have read many of the viewpoints on here and in general I have not had any real issues with this extention, there was one release that was a absolute disgrace but that was the only time I had a complaint.
I have used the ticket system twice and had replies back within 24 Hours.

The only issue I have had over the last 2/3 releases is that during the install it does not install the Zend framework so it will not work unless it is present, then there was issues with installing 2 parts of the Zend framework but this now seems to be resolved.

http://code.google.com/p/zend4joomla/downloads/list

once installed you need to activate it by going to you plugin admin.

We are a development team and have used JomSocial on more than 10 sites which includes www.irishpubsglobal.com and www.opensourceuniverse.com. We found it excellent from it's architecture wise and it's functionality wise. It does what it says and it's very easy to extend it's functionality by doing the custom coding.

Totally unhappy. Ordered Pro version over a month ago. 3 support tickets still no reply. Cannot even install since there is an unknown error with no description as to what is wrong on one of the steps.

Begged for support in my last email. Still nothing.

I have received better support from the free developers here. Jomsocial should be embarrassed!

Very frustrating and discouraged.

JomSocial is first rate software and continues to improve over time.

However, they recently halved their license period from 12 to 6 months (effectively doubling the cost!) and removed their support forums. So now the only means of support is a ticket system where replies tend to be extremely slow and often unhelpful.

I think is the best community,
the support is not the quickest,
may you can be better on this,
but if someone thinks the new versions,
its easy to understand tha the guys there are really working.
The price of it its looks like free.
Thank you very much Jomsocial!

I agree with other reviews that their support is a slow or not offering real solutions. Shutting down their forum where users can help each other is not a good idea as when you are having problems, you have to wait for them to response and it take a long time for them to respond or reach a resolution by email. If there is a forum, other users who have the same experience can share their resolutions and help resolve some problems quickly.

Hi there,

JomSocial is a very good component! I have been using it since half a year and it was easy to install, the upgrades work right from the start. Sometimes I come across minor problems, but the support is great! The support team is always there to help you out! They really take the time to fix the problem if you have one.

I will keep using JomSocial, because to me it is the best community component there is. They have updates every couple of months with new features or better features. Also, the community fits very well to my normal website and if you need, JomSocial is very customizable.

I am a very happy customer :) Can't give them enough credit, but the JomSocial team is the best!

Cheers, Natasja

The management of service requests is very bad. I opened a ticket on November 25 and today the only response I had is that the bug is present on many sites.
I paid for a product that does not work. The technic assistence does not work. The request for refund as described on site has not been answered. I have taken a complaint to the italian police for international fraud. Very poor professionalism.

I have purchased Jomsocial 8 months ago. Durng this time I turned to their support three times. Twice I have got a quite quick answer for my problem as they have been easy (I haven't found an option or things like this). But as my problem is a serious bug, that they seem cannot solve, they choose the simplest but most disgusting way to avoid the problem, they DON'T ANSWER. Doesn't matter how many letters you write to their support or contact e-mail, they simple don't answer.

They had a quite good forum where you could get answer for your problem whitout disturbing them with a support ticket. But they discountinued their forum I don't know why, but I guess that is the reason wha they don't answer. Now they get all the problems in a ticket and have to answer the same solution for the same problem repeatedly to all the clients. So they had a wrong descion I guess and cannot handle the many tickets.

Let's see my case concrete. For a big site with many images Jomsocial offers a great option, you can connect to an AmazonS3 account. A cron job is sincronizing and site is speed up. Really great! BUT! After cronjob your detail and thumbnail images will be deleted from your server, but the thumbnail link still pointing to the server thumbnail. So, on the frontend no images are shown. First they tried to solve the problem, and admit that it is a bug. As it turned out that the solution they offered doesn't work (ie, they don't know the solution), they dissapear, you won't get any more answers.

Don't worry DM letters will come. They are bombing you with extending and upgrading letters, but your problem they don't care!

I cannot express how disappointed I am. The social component itself is great, good looking, deliberate, and most of the cases well working. I don't see a real concurrent for Joomla in social component. I wanted to build up many sites with it. But I cannot as it has this bug with no solution and I already don't want, as I dont want to make any more buisnesses with a company who has as DISGUSTING ATTITUDE. Even a "go to hell" letter would much more civilized solution like simple not to answer. As I am not not the only one who is facing with this issue as one star ratings here are concering this issue.

I hope someone soon will make a same good social component with an acceptable business attitude.

If you have luck that JomSocial works OK with your system than it could be of use for you. But in case of any real issues you can forget about proper support and you are on your own. Having experienced Joomla guru or genius programmer by your hand is only thing which can help you.

Why? They just happily announced that they will not provide support over forums any more. They will use ticket support instead. Great. They even removed links from their website.

Usually this tactic is used when someone wants to hide problems from public. And their forums are full of people with problems.

When using support tickets you may end by fiddling your thumbs by days without actual answer. At least that happened in my case.
They also raised component price and lowered support time span.
Every new upgrade brings new issues because it's not properly tested.

For component of such complexity they should have more people available for support. If they advertise other developers addons on their website, they should test it first and not let their customers to serve as Guinea pigs.

Pros:
- nice FaceBook a like community system, packed with basic features.

Cons:
- for any extra advanced feature you need to purchase other commercial products, some of them may clash or create new issues with your overall system
(good luck with configuration)
- clashes with many other non related components or templates.
- support is slow or non existent
- they want to get rid of their forum

Conclusion: If I knew before how much of issues will I have with JomSocial I would never purchased it. But now it's too late. Money wasted, time wasted, nerves wasted.

I have been using Jom Social for over a year and I think it is great. keep up the good work.

Azrul has been pumping out new releases often and has to fix long lists of bugs in the software. You can see the lists on their site. They reached what they call a stable release with 2.2.5 and it has bugs and it took a year to get to that point.

Recently they released a totally new version 2.4 Boulevard and it is not compatible with Internet Explorer but they still released it as a stable version.

Internet Explorer will crash, give stack over flow errors and renders your site virtually unusable. It will not respect your Joomla 1.7 templates and will make your site look awful.

They also live in a different time zone and are sleeping when the USA is awake. You will not get a quick response to trouble tickets and they always want backend access to your site - They want your user name and password.

Because their primary language is not English their language files are full of poor sentences, punctuation and spelling. This behavior follows every release though they have had sufficient time to correct the language files.

You must be prepared for a broken product out of the box and have sufficient ability to correct the many issues that you will experience. If you do not have sufficient knowledge of Dreamweaver, PHP, AJAX, Java and Mootools - you probably want to skip this until Azrul releases an honestly stable product.

They should be ashamed of themselves for releasing 2.4 Boulevard as stable.

When I first thought of using JomSocial, I was a little weary as to whether it would do what I needed it to do. I did some research and was very impressed with the amount of plugins from 3rd party developers that could integrate with JomSocial. This proved to me that JomSocial was the leader in community networking.

With the release of 2.4, I was blown away and also distraught as I was using a very custom template and the whole css structure changed. I found the forum support overwhelming and actually found a lot of my answers on there before posting. I was able to recreate my template in a day

JomSocial now have a ticket support system and I am impressed with the level of support that has been given.

I'm due to upgrade to 2.4.1 and I am confident in the knowledge that the Component and Support team will be there should I run into any trouble.

Thanks for some awesome development!

I am new to CMS, Joomla! and JomSocial. My need was to build a social group of photographers website, with Event building, Forum and Photo Gallery capabilities. JomSocial is filled with features that allow communication between me and my members: 200+ strong and growing.

It's integration with Joomla! and Kunena is excellent. It was easy to install, without issues.

It contained slight bugs, which were immediately addressed by the technical team. A little, personal fine tuning was desired, and the tech team again responds with immediadecy and a legitimate desire to please the customer.

The extension lacks somewhat in a sophisticated capability to communicate with ALL members - custom forms/templates, etc., but JomSocial realizes this and I am sure will include this in future upgrades.

I am a staunch believer in and supporter of JomSocial, because of its outstanding customer response and genuine desire to make the best product which can be made.

A personal thanks to Mr. Fuqaha for his excellent service and a BIG thanks to Neil, one of the
technical team members. An outstanding team...Corporations like GM, Caterpillar, etc. should take lessons from JomSocial about the "customer is king."

Thanks to all.

The guys at the support stuff are the most knowledgeble I have ever came across. The responce was lightning fast and super professional, they located the glitch ad corrected it on no time. It is quite comforting to know I can depend on a cosby that is absolutely dedicated to customer service. I am fortunate I made the desissiom to partner with this company.

I will like to thank Syed Ahmad Fuqaha and all the Jomsocial team for their Support. You guys are just crazy, excellent and crazy lol.
Peace and love.
Jomsocial forever.

I love this component and all its plugins and modules.
Its simple to use and very flexible. It is by far the best community component for Joomla!
I would also like to thank their tech support for being such a great help with a couple of small issues i had. No fault of JomSocial...it was a template issue :)

thanks folks, for just being you!

This extension, at its core, is amazing. A true value for the price. However, beyond the product, the service is exceptional. The support team took the time to explore the code and settings to find the one feature I had set incorrectly.

If you are looking to build a social site or sub-site. This is the extension for you...