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I've been a paying member of JomSocial for years. Over that time prices have doubled, the support forum disappeared, and reappeared, and noticeable upgrades were implemented in their software. Some of these were frustrating changes; some were nice to see. But, I'll tell you one thing - I'm still a paying member - because they clearly are working hard, trying their best to improve the product and support, and I know that they will always be around (and that means my community will be as well).

Price: I was a member back when plans were 1 year long. Now, the plans are the same price, but only good for 6 months. So, essentially, the prices have doubled. It is quite a steep increase, but I still feel it is money well spent. If you actually stop and imagine all the coding that goes into this product, it'll make your head spin. It is a monstrous project. It would take you years and years to develop it yourself, and it wouldn't be nearly as nice. Again ==> $$$ well spent!

Support: I'm very pleased with the support. I've seen a noticeable improvement since the price doubled. I'm not sure if this is just a coincidence, or not, but it is great to have such dedicated people helping you out. They really go above and beyond.

Learning curve: like any great product in Joomla (including Joomla itself), there will be a learning curve. JomSocial has a tonne of settings, which can appear daunting at the beginning. But, once you work with it for a little while, you come to appreciate all the thought that went into it.

One word of advice - if you are using sh404SEF, turn it off for JomSocial. They are slowly working out their issues and better together, but I found that 80% of the "glitches" I found in my community were all due to conflicts with sh404SEF. Both are great products, but they do not play together as well as they could.

This is definitely the best extension to build a community. The design is great, mostly easy to customize and the social stream is really cool.

I like it very much.

Thank you JoomSocial, love u guys!

This is a nice component for a community based site. I would recommend this to all. I also request them to release a stable version compatible with Joomla 3 soon.

Well, its a good product and a great idea for the Joomla Community. That being said, as you can tell from other comments, support is somewhat limited.
I went through the trial period to "test" the product to see if it was a fit for my client, it seemed good but i had some questions, so i figured by purchasing the full edition i could get these questions answered, after-all, it is one of those little bullets listed next to the purchase price. Its been over a month since I've submitted my questions and still no answer. Not even a recognition of my existence as a customer. I've had poor support by a few component suppliers, but I usually at least get a mandatory "we are reviewing your question" response. I can't recall ever being ignored by a developer like this.
I believe they deserve 3 stars because the component itself is good. Even the documentation on the site is good-enough to solve most issues. the problem is direct support and customer service.

JomSocial has surpassed my expectations in Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 on several sites.

The many configuration options has allowed me to give a unique feel and look on several sites. The defaults had me up and running in a very short time.

In starting a new community based project my thoughts went to JomSocial but at first glance I thought the idea to be a bit out of the box even for JomSoical. But the amazing support team proved me wrong. The support team listened to my idea, spent time brainstorming configuration option and came up with a configuration and work flow that worked!

Their willingness to be open to "new" ideas and support the project save me a lot of time and the expense of custom coding.

Great job and great combination all the way around.

Thank you JomSocial; Eric and Chris. You both made this fun!

Ivey

Jomsocial itself, the software, it top notch. There is simply no comparison between it and Community Builder. Jomsocial delivers everything you could need, and then more.
Now the downside is that, like everyone says, the support has traditionally been absolutely horrible. But as of lately, it seems they're putting more priority behind support and answering a lot of overdue questions, and new ones.

I saw other reviewers saying they had problems with Jomsocial itself, they couldn't do this or that, never got it working, bugs, etc. blah blah blah.... that's bogus! Jomsocial is extremely easy to setup and configure. Yes, it requires some time to familiarize yourself, but all complex Joomla extensions do. But if you're familiar with Joomla, you should have no problem at all setting up Jomsocial. We used it many times and set it up in 10 minutes. If these people have problems, rest assured they simply don't know what they're doing or are amateurs in dealing with Joomla.

Is Jomsocial for beginners? Nope. But then again, if you're going deep enough to need Jomsocial, then you should not be a beginner in the first place.

bottom line: Jomsocial delivers what no other extension out there can, and it does so perfectly. I love it!

This social extension for jooomla I like for its rich options and possibility to involve site users in action. Works well, all initial questions were resolved with support.

I bought this extension because almost everyone agrees that it is a very good extension, even though the support was terrible.

However, as of last week, Jomsocial has reinstated their forum. Support so far has been excellent! It remains to be seen if it stays that way of course, but so far so good. So two thumbs up for Jomsocial!

Surely that's the best extension joomla ever have. But support is not so good. if you are looking for jomsocial support you may have to wait two weeks or much longer ;(

I use this tool for years and actually has never had any troubles with it, its management and I got support on request when this was necessary.
Thank you.

the learning curve with jomsocial is quite steep. the extensions undoubtedly offers a lot of features that help to run a successful community. beginners will probably spend a lot of time to understand the whole concept behind this extensions. if you plan to heavily customize this extensions without php knowledge - forget it. i would give this extension 3 stars for usability and features.

the main problem with jomsocial is the support though. did i just say support? unfortunately it is pretty much non-existent. many users before me have already complained about the lack of support. i'm just confirming what everybody else said. i had a billing problem and although i urged them two times to reply to my (very simple) request but they decided to play dead.

It's my first time when I use Jomsocial and it was very easy to install and config, but it has some options missing. What I mean by that is that there's no way to disable the tips, which, by the way, are showing all over the WRONG places, meaning they are covering the text fields, the scrolling lists and the checkboxes. The only way to disable them is to phisically remove some options from its files and believe me, it's a very, VERY annoying job that takes a lot of time and it's supposed to be made by an old chinese.

When clients of mine used to request some kind of community or social
function on their websites, I would shudder and try to talk them out of it.
I have implemented JomSocial on a number of sites in the past few months on
a recommendation and have found it easier than I could have imagined.
Thanks so much!

its really a great extension,,,what i like more about it is you can get all the modules & plugins nice gallery ,good display of profiles & its compatible with a lot of other extensions which it really makes it easy & it does work good with a lot of templates too ,,,and i totally agree on that support part , i highly recommend you this,,simply its very unique extension & comparing it to COMMUNITY BUILDER ,,its not confusing at all ,,you pay for it,,you get the full package ,,in few minutes you'll be setting your JOMSOCIAL on your site ,,,for me ,,there's no perfect extension ,,every extension got bugs & problems but we just need to be patient & cleverer in dealing with bugs & issues,,,

Personally, when I still had an active license (and when the Jomsocial forums were still up) I got the majority of my help from other end users. This is not to say that the developers were not around to help, however getting support from them was quite a bit slower than getting help from other paying customers who had the same issues as I did with my own site. But, this was when the forums were still live. Since the forums were taken down the support from the Jomsocial community is not as strong, mainly because the structure of the new community doesn't allow for as much (as as easy) interaction between users. Keep that in mind before you purchase a license.

With that said, aside from (typically) minor annoyances the bugs in Jomsocial are minimal. There have been occasions when the issues were a bit more significant but mostly the software is pretty solid.

Feature wise, the Jomsocial team has gone all out in meeting the needs of a Joomla-based social community. No, you won't be able to launch the next Facebook with JS, however you you shouldn't expect to match FB with a component that costs less than a couple hundred dollars.

Aside from the minor support issue, I still recommend Jomsocial to anyone who wishes to launch a social network. The software is worth 5 stars but if you are unfortunate enough to run into issues you may understand why I rated it with just 4.

This extension will make (not break) your site.

Hands down this is one of the best extensions I've used. It deserves no less than a 5 star rating.

I can understand some of the reviews regarding support, and I agree that those of us who Joomla prefer support forums over a ticket system, as that is how we typically provide support to our own clients.

However, the quality of the extension is superb and you can tell that the development philosophy is wrapped around user friendliness.

If you are looking for an extension that will get you a social site out of the box, this is it. If you are looking for an extension that you can customize to match your niche, this is also it.

The component and the feartures are great, but a little bit buggy.
The support wants all my credentials (FTP, mySQL, Backend) before I become a solution. Thats not client-friendly... I prefer a support forum, like before.

I have been purchase since last 2 year but looklike function just improve a little bit, all of major update is about bug fix :S

Nearly all of mods,plugs,components for this extension is commercial so If you look forward to find new mod,plug,com to improve your community you should be alway pay more and more money :S

poor support and poor document for developer if you want few click set up then run community app like this extension will be alright but not easy for who want to mod by themself even expertise developer

Well Jomsocial is really nice, component, I have installed it on my website. I am really happy, the best this is that support is too good, I had couple of issues , there was guy i guess his name Dimas , He was awesome programmer, he fixed all the issues in no time. Thanks to Dimas and Jomsocial.

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.