The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

Something I have noticed with a lot of image gallery display extensions concentrate on the flashy/pretty "look at me I make your web site awesome" element. As a consequence they don't have anything genuine to bring to a *productive* user experience for the site visitor.

Xpert Scroller is refreshingly different.

I think the strength here is that the creator has kept it both simple and real. The component is easy to install and has genuine flexibility in terms of how it functions on your site.

With this site, it's enabled me to use a greater level of imagery to convey the sort of branding that I want to put forward for the event.

In the articles that I have set to display through the scroller, the thumbnail image and text has been at the top of the article, followed by a "read more" break and the full size version of the image. In each of these articles, in the Advanced Parameters I have also set "Intro Text" to "hide".

What this means is that in addition to the navigation menu, the site visitor can click on an image in the scroller. This then causes the content of the article to be displayed in the content pane on the page. In this case, the visitor then sees the large version of the image appear with any further descriptive text. Visit the site to try it out for yourself.

Whilst I did wait for about a week to receive a reponse on the discussion forum regarding a question, the follow-up posts received responses pretty much straight away. On a practical level I can't really fault the experience, though I was wondering for a while if the forum post (saved for moderator approval) had instead been lost in the system.

All up, it's an extension that — used properly — has something very real to offer to the user experience of a web site. For me, it's a "keeper".

The integration with Joomla is so seamless that you'd be forgiven for never knowing that it was previously an issue.

The forum component is actually a work in progress and is officially not recommended for production, but it appears to be rock solid to me. The author has also tested its capabilities with 10,000 posts worth of data and it didn't skip a beat. I'm certainly happy to use it.

The existing functionality is impressive, though you may find that there are things that are not there yet. This will only be a temporary issue as the author pro-actively asks for what features should be added next, as well as dealing with any bugs that are discovered.

Both the development ethos and the smooth integration make this component a winning choice for me. (Especially as I don't want to know about integration hiccups.) By all indications this will become *the* forum component for Joomla in the near future.

Having shipped the installation of sample data on the site, I decided to go searchoing for a breadcrumbs module for Joomla 1.5 and this is the one that I found.

Very simple to install, and it just plain works. Good to have some control over how it behaves via the configuration parameters.

For the simple love of all good things Joomla, I appeal to the author to not require user registration in order to download. All you're going to end up with is a bunch of user logins that are used once only. Oh, and a web site in English (even if only an option) would also be nice.

Sounds like pain relief at its best. Looking forward to when a J1.5 compliant version comes out.