The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I've just spent the last 2 hours trying to get this configured - and I've just worked out the reason why it's totally non-invasive - it's not a real bridge.

All the bridges I've used before let you effectivly wrap the desisred external program inside a joomla website - and get the same look and feel (some minor CSS changes will have to be done of course).

Rokbridge doesn't wrap phpbb inside your joomla install - it syncs the users, but when you go to the 'forum' menu item - it just takes you to the vanilla phpbb install.

The solution for the 'look and feel' is to use the joomla wrapper.... or a RocketTheme template & the matching Rockettheme PHPBB template.

Wrappers simply don't work well for forums as no external links will work correctly - if google caches your site - and someone clicks on the cached link, you won't see the wrapper - just the plain phpbb3.

This review is a bit of a rant, but I reallt think this component shouldn't call itself a bridge as it only completes 50% of the tasks that you would usually expect it to.

When I write reviews for components, it's either because I've had a terrible experience, or a fantastic one.... In this case it was the latter.

Wordpress / Wordpress MU is probably the most complicated bridge ever created for joomla - i've used quite a few myself, and nothing matches the scale of this - the developer must be an inspired coder to have made this work.

This component let's you actually use wordpress or wordpress MU inside joomla - the full wordpress.... the worlds best blogging platfrom pretty much with all the features intact.

I do have to say that if I my knowledge were as it was 2/3 years ago, I would have fallen flat on my face and would probably be writing a complaining review instead.

I've got lots of experience with joomla and I've got basic css/html/wordpress - and to get the most out of this component - you need it.

The basic themes that work out of the box are very basic - there is a video showing you the methods involved in modifying a template, but again you need quite a lot of knowledge of php/html to translate what they're telling you for the template you've chosen.

I've spent probably 8 hours getting the wordpress template to match the joomla template, and it was a tough job - but it does look fantastic now.

The reasons for it being tough are as follows;

Wordpress templates are made by lots of different people - each template can include javascripts, use ccs selectors that are already in use in your template, contain backlinks and just contain bad code that might not look right in your browser.

There's no way the developers can possibly help people modify templates for free, it's far too complicated, they probably can't even modify them and re-release them due to the 'permissions from the creators' issue.

I've got a joomla site with 3 wordpress blogs working and looking perfect - It's taken quite a lot of work getting it to look spot on (I am a bit of a perfectionist though) and I'm very happy with the result - I can't thank the developers enough - my favourite joomla component by a huge margin!

Tony Brown.

I bought this component a month and a half ago - and got it up and running in it's basic form.

Trouble is, some of the modules don't work correctly (the latest articles in the knowledgebase for instanse - very important to us).

I submitted a support call and set the priority to urgent (10 days - very slow).

After 2 weeks I hadn't had a response, so I added to the ticket asking for an update.

It's now 5 weeks later, and I've got no response.

This is one of the more expensive components (my version cost me £120) so the lack of support is not just completely unacceptable but also makes this component unusable in a corporate environment.