This forum is based on the old Fireboard engine and despite a new look, the old ugly buttons still remain.

It works well in terms of posting and offers what you would expect from a basic forum.

However, I have some pretty annoying error which I assume to be bugs that keep popping up in my log files.

On top of that, some of my users are unable to view their profile page (the forum is integrated with CB).

This in itself is frustrating as I have live users, most of which can view their profile, but some that cannot (this is using the Kunena Profile tab on the top of the forum).

Despite numerous requests on the forum over at least 1 week, I have only received one vague and fairly unhelpful response from a developer.

I offered my services up to help develop the site and heard nothing back. Not good for building relationships and the 'community' they claim they want.

My advice would be to look elsewhere for a solution based on the poor response and feedback you get from the Kunena team.

If you don't, frustration awaits - as well as angry users.

As a hand-coder, Tiny-MCE has a bad, bad feature of stripping out all the line breaks of your code.

JCE has no such trouble and it's HTML editor is excellent -even down to line numbers.

Top work and Joomla would do well to take note of this and add it to their Tiny MCE.

Without a doubt this is easy to use. I have it running fine on 1.5.9 so I guess the previous user has not enabled legacy.

You just type your code into your HTML and the chart is displayed. There is an annoying logo that comes up with it but could be removed.

What lets the whole thing down is its inability to display charts and graphs in modules.

Because of this bad oversight, it is very limited.

At least it doesn't say it's open-source when it clearly isn't though like other graph programs here.

The product install simply and easily - always something you want!

There were a couple of issues I had (turned out to be local and nothing to do with this software). After emailing Olle, he replied back to me within half and hour on 3 separate occasions, which was greatly appreciated.

The software is simple and easy to use and the ability to re-style the pages could not have been made easier for anyone who knows HTML and CSS.

Whilst the software may not have categories etc., it's simplicity makes it a strength in my mind.

Good work Olle!

Be very wary of this software. It is very badly structured and thus if you are trying to style it up, it can literally take hours trying to find out where class tags are.

Imagine that you are holding the end of a piece of string. The rest of the string is on gigantic knot that fills the room. You then discover that there is more than one ball of string knotted into this bundle.

Now unravel it - welcome to Virtuemart.

The forums are littered with people asking questions that rarely get an answer.

I am a professional web designer/developer and even I gave up on it in the end.

If you want to know how an open source shopping cart should be done, go to www.zencart.net. This was recommended to me after I gave up on Virtuemart. It doesn't work inside Joomla, it is a standalone product but if you are looking to build a store I strongly advise you go to Zen. The code is elegantly and logically structured. The site is easy to mark-up with CSS and there is a search function so you can find where code is in any document.

Oh, and the developers of Zen don't put a message on their site saying code is more important than design so they may or may no get around to looking at design problems.