The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

With due respect to the other reviewers, my initial reaction was that the entries had to be fake. My experience has been night and day.

One can forgive a lot for free and open source extensions. If this product wasn't a paid product this review wouldn't exist. It's a different story when you lay down your -- or your client's -- cash to support a product and a product developer and find that neither quality in product nor support are as anticipated. So such a review exists.

You pay this much for an extension and you expect it to be ground-breaking, elegantly designed, super efficient, and feature-rich. Contrary to other reviews, it is not "excellent," it is not a polished high-quality professional-level product, it is basic. The fact that in response to some feedback, suggestions, and issues, the developer has let me -- and my increasingly impatient client -- sit in silence for nearly two weeks (and counting) is proof the developer has limited interest in excellence.

So, right off the bat, as far as "customer service" and "support" go, the quotation marks are appropriate. Defensiveness, posturing, arrogance, and discourtesy are not what I associate with either. Ask for help, provide feedback, or identify issues at your peril: the developer acts like you kicked his dog, and will repay you by delaying or ignoring support requests and issues.

I've worked with many of the open source and free extensions out there, and have often submitted issues, questions, and feedback, and this is honestly the first time I've had to deal with the attitude of a sulking teenage girl giving you the silent treatment because you confessed she did look fat in that dress.

So here, offered purely as purchase decision criteria, are some of the issues I have encountered so far - most of which would not be an issue had the developer followed, instead of ignored, common Joomla conventions. Something you would expect from a freebie hack job, not a paid product.

1. The extension does not leverage standard Joomla Access Control for front-end menu management privileges.

Contrary to convention, you give front-end management ability by typing in a single username as menu administrator in a field buried in the extension's parameters. Make the naive mistake of relying on your long experience with convention-following extensions and the developer will offer a snarky "RTFM" when you inquire why you're not seeing front-end menu management functionality.

Given this, the product either assumes there will only be one person with privileged to manage menu content from the site front-end, or from a poor security perspective sloppily assumes that any number of people in a restaurant office will share one set of credentials. Also, whereas for the longer term, the Joomla access control approach would handle staff turnover gracefully regarding front-end menu management, this nonstandard approach introduces one more thing you always have to remember to change whenever the designated menu administrator leaves.

2. The extension ignores the convention, power, and flexibility of Joomla content categorization.

In this product, a menu "type" is a misnomer. Strictly speaking, "menu type" in this extension is the NAME of a menu (and is what is displayed as the menu's title on your site). It is NOT a descriptor for a category of menus, as the product description implies. So, if you have a number of different dinner, breakfast, special event, and holiday menus, or menus specific to the day of the week or that are seasonal or otherwise recurring, there is no direct way of treating them as groups or displaying them in groups.

3. You have only one component page option for displaying your list of menus on your site: a single page that dumps the hyperlinked title of all published menus into a simple bulleted list (with each menu's "type" as its title).

More advanced users can certainly leverage direct links to each individual menu, but in going that route you commit to making the provided component page redundant (e.g. set it visible only to administrators). But since your one promotion gets dumped at the bottom of that component page you HAVE to display the component page as a public page or give up displaying a promotion. Keep in mind, the product comes with no companion modules or plugins for displaying parts of menu or promotion content elsewhere on your site (like, say, on the front-page where a promotion belongs...).

Given this and the limitations of #1 and #2, keep in mind that contrary to standard Joomla content you will not be able to display categories of menus in groups on a page or as groups on separate pages, and so you will also not have the flexibility of making some menus non-public (e.g. client-specific menus for special events, weddings, office parties, award ceremonies).

4. For good reason, Joomla incorporates the content data fields Created By/On and Modified By/On so that administrators can track when content was changed and who changed it.

This product ignores this basic convention, leaving a restaurant manager with no way of knowing who changed what when.

5. Joomla uses database "text" fields for content fields like descriptions that allow for freeform text and HTML/CSS. This product ignores this convention for menu item descriptions.

You won't know until the work you've done on a menu item is mysteriously and frustratingly truncated (three or four times) that the developer defined this as a tiny fixed-length character fields of 255 characters. Even if there was a practical reason, which there likely isn't, there is no mention or warning about this, no courtesy character countdown in the description field to indicate that you are reaching your limit and are verging on losing content. Anything entered beyond 255 characters simply, and silently, evaporates.

This narrow limit also means that in practice you either have to proactively limit your description text or its presentation (e.g. if a menu item for some reason had an embedded video or some php to grab the market price of the day you'd quickly run out of room for an item description). Kind of a buzzkill if you're doing a menu for something other than a corner hotdog stand.

**From a support perspective, when I inquired whether there was some practical reason I couldn't increase the size of the menu item description field without hosing something up my apparently imbecilic question was ignored.

6. The workflow is increasingly laborious as the amount of content increases, but had the developer followed Joomla's lead with a few simple standard conveniences it would be much better. For example:

6a. There are no customary useful "sticky" column header sort links on menu type, section, and item pages ("sticky" meaning the page remembers when you return to it until you explicitly reset the page filters -- what we've come to expect on all Joomla management pages with tabular data). So no standard ability to sort what is potentially an unwieldy growing number of entries.

6b. There is no customary useful "sticky" search field filter on menu type, section,and item pages. So no standard ability to narrow by search value what is potentially an unwieldy growing number of entries.

6c. Filtering on the menu section and menu item pages is limited to menu type and menu section, respectively. Joomla's convention is to offer more complete filtering (e.g. show only rows that are published).

6d. Although there is limited filtering, these filters are not "sticky" so every time you return to the page (of what is potentially an unwieldy growing number of entries), you must redo the filter for the menu type or section you're working on. And because filtering is not "sticky," in use the filtering quickly becomes a non-feature -- useful in theory, but after a while it fails in its intent to simplify workflow.

6e. On all pages having ordered tabular data (e.g. articles, categories) Joomla provides up/down row sort arrows as a useful and efficient alternative to having to manually type in numbers and save the order column to change the order of entries. The developer ignores this convention.

6f. On all pages having tabular data (e.g. articles, categories) where some page features operate on multiple selected entries (e.g. delete, publish/unpublish), Joomla provides a column header checkbox to toggle all rows on or off. This exists on the menu items page but is omitted on the menu type and section page. As with all standard Joomla pages where you manage tabular data of this nature, multiple selection used in combination with column and search filtering greatly improves efficiency and productivity.

7. Finally, calling the "promotions facility" a "feature" is a bit of a stretch. It has the feel of something thrown in as a low-effort-minimal-design afterthought. Also, the plural in "promotions" is a misrepresentation. Let's call it what it is: a single featureless promotion title, image and html field that get dumped out at the bottom your menu list page. Be aware that:

7a. In absence of a standard Joomla content table structure to manage promotions plural, you only ever have one promotion. For every new promotion you must clear and lose the content in the previous promotion. No archive or history of promotions, and no direct ability to reuse the work you did to construct previous or recurring promotions. You also do not have menu-specific promotions, which would be more logical and useful.

7b. You have no control over the placement of your one promotion, it is dumped to the bottom of your menu list page, potentially under scrolled content. As mentioned above, there is no module or plugin for displaying promotion or menu content anywhere on your site. I think most people would agree that a promotion belongs on the front-page. Putting the promotion above the menu list, rather than below, would at least be an improvement. Or provide an option.

7c. Contrary to Joomla conventions, there is no control over whether your one chunk of promotion content is published or unpublished, or whether or not it is visible to the public (e.g. for purpose of hiding a promotion from the public that is still in the draft and testing stage), or whether the promotion is published within a specified data range. All standard content parameters, all parameters that would be useful but are missing here. If the promotion title is non-empty it is displayed. That's the feature.

7d. There is no management tab in back-end administration for managing your one promotion. The promotion management area is found, nonintuitively, appended to the bottom of the "menu types" page.

Again, if this was a free or open source extension this level of criticism wouldn't be appropriate and this review wouldn't exist. Probably had the developer made a better effort and impression this review would not exist. But for what is a rather expensive extension that has failed to meet expectations, potential customers have every right to gain some understanding of some of the product's deficits, faults, and problems though another user's experience. And its developer has every right in a public customer forum to understand where paying customers feel that product fell short, where it needs improvement, and what is problematic.

Unfortunately in hindsight, after working with this product I realized that for all of its promise and fanfare this product doesn't really do anything that is unachievable by core Joomla features. Granted, this in theory is much less of a pain in the butt, but in the product's current state I would have had a lot more flexibility, more control over where/when/how every layer of the content is displayed, and ultimately a better end-result had I just put a little extra effort and planning into using something like K2 (free with lots of support and related extensions) or even just plain old Joomla categorized articles displayed with category blog/list layouts (also free with lots of support and related extensions).

At the outset I'm going to tell you that I sound a bit cranky here. But I guess in this day and age when there are so many freebie extensions available, developers should really bend over backwards to provide support and a high quality product - at least higher quality than the free version they are up-selling you from - when someone steps up to invest in their efforts and buy a pro/commercial version.

I am frustrated because I paid to get the pro version, believing that it was going to be a step up and much better, and that I would have support on hand, and - beware - the pro version isn't much different or better than the free version.

Although I do have a list of what I think are issues, omissions, and bugs with QGallery that potential purchasers should know about, I will say that my biggest beef is the complete absence of the "support" they promise for owners of the paid product.

I purchased this two weeks ago for a client site. Immediately I started running into issues, questions, and inconveniences. I took the patient route and went to their support forum and added a post. Two weeks have gone by -- with 2 addendum added -- without so much as a peep from them. The only brief sign of life I noticed was that my first posting, originally categorized under issues had been recategorized under "suggestions," and all of it has gone ignored.

I followed up my forum posts with a direct email to NetQ support and not a peep there either.

So, apart from the nonexistent promised "support," here are some issues you should be aware before when purchasing the pro version:

1. QGallery comes with a super-nice automatic feature to hook up your facebook account -- you click the "connect to facebook" button in admin and it goes and gets and fills in all of the nerdy keys and codes it needs to read albums. The pro version boasts also being able to allow site visitors to add comments to photos that are sync'd back to the connected facebook account. BUT NetQ does not carry through with the same type of feature for hooking up comments. So if you are not a facebook pointy-head, you paid for a comments feature you cannot use. And, actually, because facebook has, as I understand it, recently phased out your ability to add FBML apps to your page (at least for fan pages), there is no straightforward way to get all of the secret keys and black magic QGallery requires to to hook up commments. Now Facebook requires you go down the mystical road where you have to use one of its developer APIs. Voodoo to me.

2. If you plan on putting QGallery on a site page that is anything but plain white, the album list view is going to look like crap. They have a simulated spiral book image border they put around the album cover photo, but no background inside it, behind the photo. So you see through to whatever you have for colors and images on your sheet.

3. In the initial setup, you would think by their marketing that the power and ease of use includes the option to automatically add all facebook albums for the connected account. Not so. You must manually add each album. Once they are added they should sync, though I haven't test it yet so this is one of those "I hope it works" things. So, put a post-it up somewhere to remind yourself that if a new album is added or removed on the facebook side, you need to go in and do the same in your site in order to keep things fully mirrored. Seriously - "Want to import all?" Yes. "For" loop. Done.

4. Manually adding albums is made more inconvenient by a poorly designed import process. The popup shows all facebook albums every time, not just the ones you haven't imported. If you have a lot of facebook albums to hook up with your site be prepared to go bleary-eyed every time you open "import" to figure out where you left off.

5. Chances are 99.99% that to curb insanity you are going to want to keep the same album name in the site as in facebook, otherwise it would be a nightmare to keep things straight. However, you must manually enter a title in a field scrolled way at the bottom of the popup. Seriously, it'd be such an easy thing to default the album name into the field when you select an album for import.

6a. Once you have all of your albums imported you have the standard joomla table page and toolbar. However, for some bizarre reason they have left out the standard up/down sort order buttons in each album row. So, when you have to reorder rows be prepared to type in lots of numbers.

6b. Oh, by the way, sort order is your only option for displaying your list of albums and photos. Who doesn't provide a dropdown to select from a few sorting options these days? I'd expect at least that basic - standard - level of control in a paid product.

7. When the album list view is displayed in your site, it will dumbly go ahead render out html for albums with zero photos in them. And since, by default, it picks photos from the album itself to display as the album thumb, albums with zero images show up with no image...and if you have something other than a plain white background, well you get the picture. Again, a couple easy lines of code to skip them.

8. When you import an album certain things are defaulted for the album, including a "use global values" toggle. However, there is no popup or page where you can manage those global values. You would think it would be on the menu item component settings page, but the basic parameters area is empty. So if you need different properties from default for your albums -- thumb sizes, show album and picture titles, etc. -- be prepared to manually edit each album and change them...and try to keep all of them consistent.

9. The pagination properties (row and column count on a page) aren't labeled as such but they control both the album list and picture page(s). If you need a different pagination for your album list you can't. This goes on the growing list of what seem like lazy omissions.

10. I was going to point out similar issues with global settings with respect to facebook album/picture comments, but since you can't use that feature I'll leave those out.

11. The module included with the component doesn't know or care about global settings in the event that you want to keep it consistent with the component view.

12. The pro version promises "documentation." This is not included in your download package, there is no mention of where to find it, and, in my experience, there is no NetQ support to give it to you.

13. QGallery does not work with the core SEF URL feature, so you get SEO-unfriendly URLs from the menu page through any child page it creates.

14. Without the assistance of an add-on like "Advanced Module Manager" (by #NoNumber!), good luck trying to control what modules and templates appear on child album and photo pages generated by Qgallery. Unless the modules you need on Qgallery-created pages are set to show on "All" you are out of luck getting the modules on anything but the qgallery component menu page. That's a bit inconvenient.

15. With a "professional" paid version of an extension I'd expect some level of easy - customary - control over at least a few basic visual properties so that I can fit it into the design of my site without completely rewriting the extension css. Not so. The pro version comes with just one look and if you're not a css nerd you have to live with it and it's visual issues. Sidebar: It's a great way to learn how to use the "edit css" of Chris Pederik's Web Developer's Toolbar feature (firefox and chrome browsers)...while your client stares at his watch and formulates the decision to hire someone else next time.

So, yes, obviously I'm a bit grouchy about all of this. I went for NetQ's shiny marketing pitch and promises, gambled on it for a client project, laid out the cash for the "pro" version, which has led to delays and frustration for both me and the client.

Like a lot of extensions these days, they are half great and half not so great. I would expect a paid version to be mostly great, or see some sign that they people on hand to help you out, to compensate for not so great.

I wouldn't be nearly as grouchy had NetQ simply made the effort, taken the time, communicate, come through on their promise and actually support their product.

Many thanks to the developer for creating this very useful, easy to use, solid, and flexible extension and releasing it free under the GNU license. All I needed was an extension to allow me to pop up an article in a modal. The control and options provided are heavenly. Want all PDFs or images across your entire site to open in a modal? Configure that in the plugin, done. You don't have to touch your content at all if you don't want to. The extension does provide the ability to control individual links by giving them a specific class name, and by embedding the standard plugin tag syntax in articles. I needed a simple wrench and found a powerful toolbox. Kudos!