The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

IMHO, almost every decision made on the creation of this extensions was poorly thought through.

The interface of this extensions is FAR more complicated than it needs to be.

All of the options are fully open and not collapsible, which makes for a wall of text and radio buttons that is difficult to navigate.

The answers are in a completely different section of the component than the questions, meaning you have to manage them separately and connect them.

The answers are entirely separate from each other. I imagine eventually having a HUGE amount of questions to only a few questions.

Polls are non-modular, which means that the placement is left entirely to the user and the WYSIWYG editor. Most users are barely competent with using editors, and module placement is being left to them in the editor? Not only is it a poor method for placing modules, but it's extremely prone to frustrating the user (due to not being able to "place" the module with almost any precisions) but also frustrating the webmaster who will eventually have to rescue the user and manage all of the poor layouts being created.


Cheers,
Chris

I was looking for a simple contact form module that I could easily customize and I finally found one! I'm not sure if that was the developers intention, but it was perfect for my needs. I really need to be able to create custom contact forms with unique fields and validation styles, which most contact forms don't easily allow form, especially when it comes to validation. I'm a stickler for good validation, and most forms validation have horrible validation engines. Free Contact made customization fast and easy!


Cheers,
Chris

I tested this tool, because I liked the flashiness of the design. Unfortunately there are 2 problems I found that prevent me from using this tool.

1. Usability. The average user doesn't understand or like mouse gesture controls. If there was an option to use a control such as a scroll bar or forward and backward buttons, it would completely overcome the usability issue.

2. Speed. This tool is very very slow. My YSlow grade A site instantly became a grade C site. I don't allow my page loads to go over 3 seconds, and I do my best to keep it to ~1 second. The load time for this tool caused my page load time to be 10-15 seconds. Caching and JS/CSS compression made no difference in load time. Unfortunately these speeds are way outside of my professional standards, and I cannot use this tool on any of my sites.

I look forward to updates, because I honestly think this tool's beauty has promise.

First off, I'm very impressed with this new Joomla tool. It looks like it has robust code, a very impressive array of features, and easily brings web 2.0 to most any site with such ease that it's almost unbelievable.

It would be nice if I could load modules into the toolbar. Reason being, I have some tools that aren't just simple buttons (such as my font resizer and my ajax login module), but would work brilliantly on this toolbar.

Finally, I love that this tool has almost no impact on my YSlow score. The only impact is a single doc that won't GZip: /components/com_ubar/assets/js/bar.js?0.9.1. All things considered, that's very small price to pay. Thanks for this brilliant extension!


Cheers,
Chris

Overall, this seems to be a pretty good plugin.

My only gripe is that it gives the user too much control over MY site's styles.

The user is able to select from 1 of 5 styles for the plugin's output, which means that I have to go through and handle 5 style sheets for each of these scenarios!

The user also has control of the width of the plugin's display CSS style, which means you have to specify "300px", "100%", or some valid CSS string. Most users won't get this at all, it's entirely unnecessary, and it add confusion and add frustration to their average experience.

Users can also control whether or not there's a border, and if there's a title and description, or just a title.

Knowing what I do about UI design, most users don't want these kinds of options; they become confusing noise to most. The essence of the user experience usually sounds like, "It should just work!"

I would much prefer if all the controls were on the backend, leaving the user with only an input field for their digg username.

As I said, I like this plugin and I'm definitely keeping it, but I'm hacking it to move the controls into the backend.

I now include this plugin on ALL of my joomla site builds. Why? Unless you want a site that looks like Craigslist; minifying, compressing, and caching CSS and JS is now absolutely critical for having a beautiful, functional, and fast site.

Not only does it minify, compress, and cache, but it also allows me to exclude specific files just in case I get a rogue extension that doesn't like being minified and cached. Brilliant!

COMPLAINT: I wish I didn't have to depend on my server using ZLib in order to take full advantage of the speed tools. So, this tool is ALMOST perfect, but not quite. Still the best speed tool out there that I've used.

One thing I need to stress to everybody when using an extension like this, ALWAYS use a top level selector in your style sheets! ALL of your template styles should start with a selector like "#wrapper", this will ensure that your template CSS will ALWAYS take priority over extension CSS. Usually just using a templated CSS will do that because it will be called after your extension CSS, but when they're all compressed together, that goes out the window.

A simple plugin that does exactly what it says it does, it does it well, and it does it with style! I am so pleased with this plugin that it has become my preferred social bookmark plugin.

This is a simple tool that does exactly what it says it does.

My only comment/concern is that this seems like this tool should be a system plugin as opposed to a module.

I have now added SEO Generator onto all of my SEO sites, because it does as much as I used to do with 3 different plugins. Not only that, but it does those tasks better than any one of those 3 plugins that I've now dumped.

Here's the bonus stuff:

1. The site for this extension has a list of suggested blacklist words, which saves a bunch of time looking for words like "for", "not", "they", etc.

2. The support is top notch, fast, and friendly; 3 things that are rare with free plugins. Definitely drop a donation for this awesome plugin.

This module is almost a great module, but unfortunately it's only a mediocre module due to bugs and a few silly programming decisions.

1. SEF breaks this module. When used on the frontpage, the Item ID will be stripped from the linking URL and all of your module positions on the linked article will disappear.

2. MFP decided several months back that the thumbnail preview will use the LAST image in an, not the first. I hacked my way around it by making a copy of the first image on the bottom of the article and commenting it out. It's a crummy way to have to do business, and I doubt my client is going to be very happy when I tell them about this ridiculous work-around. I have been trying to think of a reason why I would want the last image of an article to be the thumbnail preview, and I can't think of one. I've built dozens of sites of different types and it has always made sense to use the first image. ESPECIALLY on articles that discuss a product. I want an image of the product to be in the preview, not one of the internal mechanisms! Why this was decided or can't be managed from the back-end is beyond me.

Fortunately I've got a bunch of programmers around me that I can talk into fixing bugs, and they've fixed MFP bugs several times. They're about to get another request from me about this most recent issue. With all the issues in this extensions, I can't see myself purchasing anything from Template Plazza. A free extension full of bugs is one thing, but I have no intention of buying an extension that may be full of bugs.

I have yet to find a PNG fix that actually fixes background PNG's consistently. This one works most of the time (still not all the time though), but the problem is that it breaks a lot of other stuff.

PNG's that are non-background images can be stretched until they're totally unrecognizable.

Also, every link, radio button, and submit button on the page becomes useless pictures and text.

Most of the forums on this site are very active, except for the one addressing this extension; it's all but dead. There have only been a few post in the last 9 months, and they're all unanswered questions.

To make matters worse, this extensions breaks other extensions that this same company makes! If you use Frontpage Slideshow, it won't work with this extensions unless you hack it. Granted, it doesn't require a lot of hacking, but it shouldn't require ANY hacking. Doesn't JoomlaWorks test their extensions with each other to ensure they all work together?

I've seen a lot of great extensions and support out of this company, and I never thought I'd be writing a bad review for one of these guys' products. I'm sorry to say that this one is SEVERELY lacking. I'm both surprised and disappointed.

This module works in the technical sense. It shows banners without messing up your page or giving errors. However, my experience was that it showed EVERY banner, regardless of how it was set up. The module completely disregarded section and category ID's, and instead showing every banner in the banner directory. I submitted multiple support requests and received no response. After over a month of trying to make this module work, I had to junk it and move on.

I won't give a rating, because maybe I'm just missing something obvious, but suffice it to say that I am not a newbie to Joomla.

I installed this component, went to set it up, and couldn't figure out how to activate it. It looked like the author doesn't speak english as a first language, because the directions didn't make much sense. After 30 minutes of testing, reading, headscratching, etc., I uninstalled this component.

I can't stop using this module. I keep looking at other modules, and I almost always come back to RockSlideShow!

The only way it could be better is if you could easily make images linkable.

This is a damn good module, except that it has the same minor issue that most of these kinds of modules have; some code gets stripped out. For example, when using a tag like , it removes it when you hit Apply. It'll leave a space, but that tag is removed.

I installed this component, and added some java and HTML. It errored out with code that has been thoroughly tested and is known to work. When I went to look for support, the homepage was written entirely in Czech with no translator that I could find. Unless you speak Czech, there's basically zero support for this extension. It'll either work for you or it won't, and that's it.