The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I give this one two stars only because it has the potential to work great for those who feel like burning a day or two on trial and error. If not for the potential, it would have been 1 star.

The main problem with this extension is a serious lack of documentation. They did add some installation instructions, but that is it. There is nothing to tell you how to set this thing up or to configure it, and having wasted a few hours on it, I still dont have it working properly.

Having basic documentation would solve this problem. I did find a buried link that pointed me to an outside site for documents (which should have been available on the development docs board). Unfortunately, it requires registration to view the docs and they never sent me the activation link. There is no way for non-members to contact them, so I can't even ask them to look into it.

I have also found some bugs during my brief use of the product. I consider them serious, but you may have a different opinion --

1. If you delete a Group, all accounts that are part of that group become ghosts on your system. They are still in the database, but they can not log in and are not shown in the member list.

2. Making changes to a group does not change anything. I set up a group and then went back to edit it. I tried several times to edit/change the configuration of the group, and no settings were ever saved. As soon as I clicked save, everything remained the way it was before the changes.


Recommendation -- Unless you just have a lot of free time to waste, I would say to move on past this one. You're better off to spend a few dollars on a commercial ACL package that has proper documentation and support. THIS ONE WAS HIGHLY DISAPPOINTING.

This component works pretty good. If you want a quick and easy contact page in minutes, complete with a map to your location, then look no further. This extension shows your contact information on one side, a contact form on the other side, AND a google map. It's nearly perfect. A few improvements would get that fifth star from me:

- Would be nice to have the ability to hide fields that I don't want to use (my visitors really don't need to know my mobile number)

- Would be nice to add messenger contact info (Windows Live, Yahoo, AIM, Skype), with icons

- Have the map in a separate table so that I can make it full width without pushing the contact form out of view.

- Some kind of spam bot protection to keep the email address from being harvested.


Don't get me wrong - this is an exceptional extension just the way it is. I just happen to feel that these improvements would make it perfect.

From what I can see, the product looks nice. Problem is I could see almost nothing. Pretty much every feature is disabled in the light version. It would be nice to get to test it out before being asked for 59 EU. Instead, I wasted my time installing something that I had to turn right around and uninstall. I don't fault you for wanting to earn a living, but if you're going to put up a trial version, at least make it something that let's people try it out. The lite version is little more than a glorified comment box, and JComments already serves that role on my site.