The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

Red as a company seem to have perfected the art of over engineering an extension.

So much so that last year I lost a customer that grossed me well over 3,000 GBP per anum all because every time red cart fixed something (sometimes taking days to login and apply the fix) some other element of the extension went wrong. Badly wrong in some cases.

Pros...

It worked right out of the box and I could setup a basic (and I mean very basic) shopping cart

Cons...

Support was rude and arrogant (my customer saw some of the comments and of-course this reflected badly on me)

Admin UI extremely complex and difficult to use

Fit for purpose (as mentioned above) if all you have is a few products

FYI...

I've hand coded carts, websites and web applications for well over 17 years and switched to Joomla simply to save development costs as clients are very concious about the cost of a project these days. Bad move in this case as Red cost me well over 5,000 GBP now as I would still have the client if it worked properly.

I've also held off writing a review as red was indeed still installed on one website of mine and I could not get it to uninstall without messing up the website but now I am free of red 100% and happy.

Sorry guys... You need to move the R&D in house and have more control and quicker, more professional response. It would help your business no end.

nBill lite was my billing extension of choice for quite some time (and I had tried pretty much all the others) and then I decided to consolidate all my billing and invoicing into one domain and took the plunge and bought the commercial version.

As an invoicing tool this is very good and managed everything I needed to right out of the box with very little configuration.

Time invested: 30-60 minutes.

Time saved: hours and hours...!

I'd recommend anyone looking for a billing solution to go for nBill Lite and once you are familiar with it go for the commercial version as it's well worth the money.

Well Done nBill. And thanks.

Like yourselves I manage a number of websites and even though I synchronise my users credentials for the Joomla and cPanal and my own website access they very rarely login to cPanel.

This displays critical stats quickly and easily for them on their own website and much easier than coding a solution myself.

One minor bug that I would like a fix for though:

When I ran it first time the div "cpanelInfoProSpacePercentage" was not shadinf in correctly, at all in-fact.

However, when I put a module class suffix in the backend this displayed but it changed the layout.

It'd be nice if this worked without having to use a workaround.

I have been using JUMI for a number of years now to do things like:

Automatically convert prices into other currencies
Display dynamic content pulled from a table
Handle hand coded forms and pages

All in all it's been an extremely good application accepting PHP, MySQL, CSS and HTML with only one minor issue that I had to code around:

I can't get it to fire plugins "{PluginName}" within the JUMI module or code.

Here's the process I followed:

Upgraded the primary website's Joomla installation using the Fantastico option available.
1.5.17 --> 1.5.22

Backed up the website.

As I used a copy to restore the primary website onto the secondary's domain I had to do a manual update through cPanel's file manager.
1.5.20 - 1.5.22

Backed up the website.

Applied the upgrade through cPanel's file manager.

Backed up the website again.

Exported users from the primary domain

Imported to the secondary

Backups not required but hey, you never know...!

Observations...

Maybe a simple export & Import option for people like myself who simply want the data and can edit it locally later would be nice.

Reasonably intuitive but I still read through the process prior to executing the transfer.

All in all a good component and easy to use.

I've loaded this into a website and it worked straight out of the box.

Something I'd like to see in future versions if possible:

Alternative payment gateways including cards.

My client is using PayPal so he's more than happy with the current option.