The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

It's rare to find a developer that provides as much support and expertise as Douglas does. Not only is his extension a welcome addition to anyone who needs a proper contact form or simply a form, it fills a large whole in the contact forms category.

Any time I've had an issue, I've simply emailed him and he responds quickly and accurately. I was looking for a way to migrate from qcontacts without having to redo my contacts, and he whipped up an importer within a day. Outstanding!

I'll be renewing my license when the time comes as this is an extension I literally can't live without.

I had written an extensive review on this product but apparently it was too long. So I'll keep it short and to the point.

This is an expensive piece of software that is underdeveloped, makes updating virtuemart even more tedious, and requires additional software to work. Software that is not free. I was hoping for something to avoid the backend of Joomla and after using this for a week I went back to doing it the old way. It was simply much faster that way.

The only positive thing I can say about it is that it allows you to enter orders for customers that you may take over the phone. Virtuemart's backend doesn't allow that for some reason.

Until the author comes out with an update that actually speeds up the process of running a virtuemart store, I recommend saving your money and sticking with the old way.

After trying demos of all the commercial products and some of the free ones, jcomments is absolutely perfect in its feature-list, spam protection (which still needs a little work), and layout. Since I don't require registration nor even have the option to register (there's just no need), jcomments permission settings are above reproach.

It supports avatars, bbcode, user avatars, different templates, flood control, and it is quite possibly the easiest system to set up and use.

I would rate it as Excellent except for a couple of things:
• The aforementioned spam control needs an update as the spammers have found workarounds already. Thank god for the Report to Admin link that my users have no problem using to let me know spam got through.
• Selecting Tree layout in settings doesn't allow pagination. But if you select Flat layout you can have pagination but you are unable to reply to another person's comments. Why you can't have pagination in Tree layout is beyond me. I have some articles with 100+ comments all on one page because of this.
• Sometimes you want to turn comments off after a topic has been discussed to death, but if you add the jcomments off code to the article, any previous comments disappear as well. Be nice to have a way to show comments up until the point you turned them off. Right now it's all or nothing. Maybe program in a date code to the {jcomments off} so comments before that date don't disappear.
• Support for more than just the Gravatar avatar. I know it's silly, but people like choices.

Now, even with these limitations, it is still the BEST commenting system available. It's also FREE. I really hope the developer comes out with an update (plus real JoomFish support) as this version is getting a little long in the tooth.

Other than that you can't go wrong and will be pleasantly surprised by how well it works. I've never had a conflict with jcomments or a complaint from a user about using it.

And let's face it, if your visitors are using your comment system to complain about the comment system, well, it doesn't look good. Thankfully I've never had that issue. :)

One of the biggest shortcomings of Virtuemart is the lack of gift certificates. This is where AwoCoupon shines! You simply create your gift certificate (G.C.) products, go into the AwoCoupon component, assign a gift certificate to the aforementioned product, and you're done. The component does all the heavy lifting on the background, from composing the email (HTML or plain text) to generating the G.C. code.

One glaring problem is that I use the shipvalue module to determine shipping costs based on the value of the order. Since I can't charge shipping fees on a virtual product, and there is no way to exclude products in the shipvalue module, I contacted the developer.

Not only did the developer, Seyi, fix the problem, but he did it without complaining and after 2 days of going back and forth, he solved the problem. I only hope he offers the solution in the virtuemart forums as I know other people have this problem as well of not being able to exclude certain products with the shipvalue module.

This is a GREAT company with awesome support and I can't say enough about their expertise and professionalism. The component is a coding marvel and will complement your virtuemart store if you need coupons and G.C.

Just installed and it works like a charm. Needed something to show a random review or two, and it worked perfectly. Nice job and thanks for keeping the rare virtuemart module free for a change!

This little plugin does everything but create article PDFs (and it may do that but I just haven't found the right button!). You can exclude it from certain sections, all sections, same with categories, place the button before or after articles, modify the CSS for it's placement (I turned it on), and more. It lets you retweet an article you like, bookmark, etc... The developer really took pains to address the shortcomings of the other items out there and I couldn't find a single thing to complain about. Well, maybe one thing: the Addtoany buttons are not very attractive. But that isn't his fault, but addtoany.com. Other than that, it's perfect. Thank you!

For the life of me, I can't get the hover effect to work (mouse over to produce the drop-down menu). As it stands, I have to click on the addthis button for it to show up. It works fine on your demo site, so I don't know why this won't work. It's not an option, so I'm assuming it's simply a default feature. If reading, please explain how to make this work with the mouse-over effect. Thank you.

I was looking for something like this, and it has a lot of great features. However, you can't exclude it from showing on the front page of an article (especially if you want to only show it after the Read More jump). You also can't exclude by category or section ID (helpful for items that make it silly to have). With these two things, I think it would be a five-star utility.

After getting 'network is busy' errors on my site, my tech guy at my hosting company told me the problem was with linkr:

"The main problem appears to be unoptimized MySQL queries. An optimized MySQL query executes in a fraction of a second and uses very little resources. We have noticed over the last few weeks, that your database has been under the top usage user for quite some time. I searched for the query which I see many times showing up in the top list of slow queries and am 99% sure it is the linkr plugin."

I really loved this component and plugin, but even I noticed a significant slow down when visiting my site for the two weeks I had it installed.

Hopefully this review, if read by the developer, can help them understand the importance of writing efficient MySQL queries. Once I disabled Linkr, everything returned to normal. Keep up the good work as I am looking forward to the next release that I hope will fix this deal-breaker problem. Thanks.

I run a blog, and quite literally everyday I have posts (quoted items) from other sites that have links in them. Before, I had to go into each link and set the target to "new window", but with the wonderful plugin, I can copy and paste any information into an article and those links will open in a new window.

As the author indicates, the worst thing you can do is have links that send people away from your site. And most people will thank you for not making them hit the back button (if they even remember to).

Plus, the plugin allows you to hide the external link icons, which is a HUGE plus. When you have 10 or so links in one article, that little icon can become eye-intrusive.

So keep up the good work and thank you for a great program for Joomla 1.5. Why this isn't included in Joomla is beyond me. And for anyone wondering, the plugin only affects your content items, and you can always make the link 'self' from the editor if you want to override the plugin. :)