The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

A must have for multilingual sites.

Had the J! team included natively easy to use language views and life would be easier for webmasters...but they didn't and Falang is the free answer, although totally bypassing J! native language management.

At the present stage, Falang is the simplest free way of managing multilingual sites effectively. Simple, organized, straighforward, just like any good CMS component should be.

To become perfect, Falang just needs some extra automation:
- Bing/Google automatic translation button / cron (like MissintgT)
- Some information on creating content elements, so the community can start adding external modules
- Frontend editing

Overall, at present, the must have for J!2.5 multilingual management

If possible, I would rate K2 6 stars.

I've been using K2 in all my customer's sites and portals and have no plans of changing: it just works, like they would expect.

For now, it's an essencial enhancement to the way one can build and display content. And if you want customers to upload content themselves, there is no easier way of doing it: not only frontend editing works like a charm, even in multilingual sites, but also K2 ACL is powerful enough to manage publishing workflow.
And the inbuilt K2 presentation capabilities (the category "blog" layouts) will blow your customers mind, without making waste a ton of development hours to get the right view.
To get the most of it, some of the K2 plugins are truly mandatory, like the extended image and the extended fields. Play around with them and you will find out why.
Of course K2 has it's limitations (field search, image cache, user profile extensibility,...): it's a trade-off between ease of use and flexibility. But for 80% of the sites (not web-aplications), K2 will do the job with an ease of use and presentation flexibility no yet available in Joomla core. And the great news it that even a newbie will be able to get it up and running in no time. A great advantage over other CCK. Not to mention the no-thrills frontend editing that customers love.


The community sometimes takes a while to reply, but they eventually do, and there is lots of information in the forum, one just has to dig-in.
Overall one of the best components available for content publishing.


Thank you Fotis, you are great

I've been making joomla sites with fullscreen background for the last couple of years and always had to either use either "handmade" solutions or buy templates with such feature but with very bad styling. In every case it forced me to spend a lot of time customizing the site.
With this module, not only everything works, but also it runs flawlessly in most templates from the major clubs (RT, JA,...).
A true lifesaver.

I would rate it 6 stars :-)

The Pros:
- Compared to the other components I looked into, it has far more options and is more mature. And if you are looking for a multi-tenant reservation, this is the best. That's why I bought a license.

The cons:
- It's expensive if your are building a small portal (although it's competitive when compared to large site solutions).
- It's a standalone script that is fit into a Joomla page. Meaning that it has no integration with the template (no MVC) and you will need to have CSS coding skills or hire someone to do the job for you. Count that in on your development budget.
- It has the most confusing admin interface - both in the frontend and in the backed. Compared to other components it's close to a nightmare.
- Until version 5 it had some serious jquery conflicts with other components. It now has a feature to not load the jquery, thus solving some of them - but not all (example: gtranslate)
- Content plugins use old version of mootools, conflicting with other modules (example: Gavick news pro 4).
- It forces the admin to login into the frontend to add or edit properties. So if you are building a portal for several entities, rather than a self-servicing booking site, it becomes quite annoying to have to jump between multiple logins.
- Does not integrate Paypal payflow.
- No social network integration (Facebook, ...)
- Some of the plugins are not that well though of. Example: Jintour, which supposedly would let one sell hollyday packages only work in conjunction with room booking and not as standalone package, thus becoming confusing for property owners.


Overall it's the best solution for larger sites, especially self-servicing booking portals like booking.com.
The billing features are great if you think of monetizing your portal and overall it works quite well - most of the features are there.
But expect to be spending some money on additional CSS coding on top of the licence, to choose carefully what other components/plugins to install and to disregard most of joomla's ACL or component community features.

I've been using this plugin for quite some time now. It greatly enhances VM and is far better than the standard VM snapshot plugin. I know there is always room for improvement, but overall, it work(ed) right out of the box and with minimum fuzz. A must have for any serious VM shop.

However, since VM 1.1.8, it's not working anymore, rendering blank pages or parse errors. In the support area for the plugin there are already a few reports on this, with no reply. Too bad the developer doesn't seem to have time for this anymore, maybe someone will pick it up from here. I leave the moto.... :-)

This is one of the few "quickcarts" that works out of the box and doesn't need a lot of styling or coding to get the pop-ups right. I would give it a 4 stars, specially being a free module.

However, the code is loaded with backinks to the developer site, hidden just behind the images. There is no information on the dev site regarding these links, so beware!

Great module, works very well and looks amazing. Good job.

I've implemented it in a couple of sites, works well in some cases, but messes up the site formating in others (headings get messed, alignment breaks, etc..). Probably jquery conflicts of some kind.

Overall a good solution with a great look

great script, works out of the box and does most things that some paid scripts do. Thumbs up for the developer.

Unfortunately, account creation doesn't integrate with jomsocial (only with CB) and, when using myapi and jomsocial fbconnect in my site, conflicts arise and logins stop working. I had to uninstall myAPI, much to my discontent.

Browsing in Jomsocial support forums I've seen a few webmasters who also had the same problem and ended up disabling myAPI.
It's a pity, because it greatly extends the JS FB integration and does some things that the JS team seems unable to implement (publishing to FB wall when user logs in my site, adding fb comments to articles, etc...).
So here is something (I believe), would even make myAPI a must have for any site.

would also be nice to have a fbinvite box...and FBcomments integration in VM flypages :-)

Anyway, great job.

This extension is actually a good idea, because not only allow's you to make a static sitemap, but also to mix several menus into it, change the names and priorities individually. Thumbs up for that.

However, maybe because it's still an alpha, it didn't work for my site, rendering an empty sitemap.

But the actual annoying issue is that it renders a backlink to the developers site (dioscouri), both in the html and xml version, that is always rendered even if disabled in the backend.

I don't want to repeat what has already been said here, but in fact AWO Coupons gives VM the coupons functionality it badly needed.

And not only it's a great script, but also the developer is very responsive. We found a bug in the way VM processes coupons and taxes, and not only Seyi was quick to reply, but also found a solution within VM and released a new version of the plugin in less than two days.

Thumbs up !!

I had been asking Bernard for the integration of Openinviter in AUP for over a year. He finally took the time and integrated it right on time for a promotion we were preparing on our website, that has a VM powered on-line store. The idea was to get more people into the site, to receive the newsletter. More people receiving the newsletter, more purchases on the on-line store. That simple.

Rules for the contest: during the whole February 2010 we asked people to invite their contacts to join the site. In the beginning of March we would check the points and give away 3 prizes to the 3 top inviters. Everyone would receive one point per email sent and 20 points for successful registration.

Some tweaks had to be done to Joomla core registration in order to immediately login the user after first registration and direct him to the AUP invite feature. That was critical to assure a smooth registration process+immediate invitation (like the feature on Parainvite). We also had to create a secondary flow of email validation, sent in the background after registration, to avoid spammers and false registrations. By the end of February we had to manually check for these false registrations and remove the referral points.

Early in February there were around 250 registered users. We announced the campaign using the newsletter, Facebook, Twitter and the website. People started flowing in.
In mid February Bernard warned me that openinviter was already available with AUP and we immediately installed it and made another newsletter reminding people of the campaign and preliminary results. That boosted invitations even more.

At March 1 2010 we counted the results: we had gone from 250 to over 800 members!
At present day there are still registrations coming in.

So here it is. A success. Thanks to Alpha User Points. Bernard, you're the best.

By the way, we had some questions in the integration features and Bernard replied in the forum always in less than one day. That's a better result than many commercial components provide. Truly amazing.

Just some final thoughts on this:
- I think AUP has the potential to become a must have for any site, not only for it's ability to award users for actions, but also for it's ability to make users invite others. That's the basis of Facebook growth and we all know where it's taken it. Thanks Bernard for the effort in integrating openinviter.
- AUP can easily become a powerful Affiliate marketing tool. With the right rules for tracking for example, Virtuemart sales and AEC membership subscriptions, this can become THE affiliate component for every joomla site. Just think of three simple scenarios:
a) A VM store where you automatically convert every purchaser in a affiliate and take him to the AUP invite right after his first purchase.
b) A community site where you reward users for their activity and also for inviting other users to buy premium memberships.
c) A community site where users create their free and premium content and you give them part of the revenues for the premium content subscriptions or pay-per-view.

Of course, this may involve a lot of work and coding. But this would clearly take AUP to the next level and maybe into a paid component like AEC or Jomsocial.
Just some thoughts.

Anyway, thanks Bernard for the work in this great tool. Once again, You are the best.