The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I spent a whole afternoon searching for plugins to resize images from articles which should be displayed in blog-layout pages on a Joomla 2.5 site in unified size. I tested about 4 or 5 plugins that promised to do that but each had some serious drawbacks, so that I eventually could not use it. Then I found "BK Multithump". Dispite its awkward name, this was my personal salvation today, really. "BK Multithump" has plenty of settings (which I will need some time to check all of them), however, what I needed (a plugin to render resized images exclusively on blog pages, without messing around with other stuff) worked flawlessy directly after just installing the plugin and telling it the desired image size. Links from the thumbnails to the original articles do also work.

Thank you for this great extension.

(I had found it earlier had it a more "telling" name... something like "BK Imageresize" or so...

Kind regards,
Christian Geiselmann

As a newspaper journalist by training, I really missed a convenient possibility to add captions to pictures in my various Joomla sites.

This solution comes with everything I desire: Easy to install, easy to adjust, easy to use!

It will become one of my top-10-extensions I use on all my sites. Thank you for the great job!

I was looking for an extension that would help me provide to my site visitors a flexible RSS subscription tool. Ninja RSS does exactly what I expected, and it comes with a huge number of parameters to set.
I like especially the build-in "button maker" where you can create your own RSS button (changing text and colours) without even leaving your back-end.

Initially I had a problem with defining what contents would appear in the feed. Some closer look at the settings, and two minutes of searching in the Ninja RSS help forum solved my problems.

Attention: If you are fiddling with your settings and you do not see a change in your browser window, set the "cache time" from 3600 seconds (default) to 0 or 1 second, this will help. At least in my case it solved the issue.

I give it four stars here (not five) because with some help-section the component and module would be even better.

This component gives you a sophisticated tool to provide an in-depth search function for your website.

The basic idea is that using "Custom Properties" you can assign tags as you like to each individual article. The component (with its plugins and modules) then allows you to provide the user with a multi-level search function in order to filter the articles by those tags. As ususal for search functions, a list of articles meeting the search requirements is then displayed.

This can be useful when you have a lot of articles, and your visitors want to see only a selection of them, with much more possibilities than only using Joomla's sections and categories.

The backside is that it works - by definition - only as long as the relevant articles are tagged appropriately. And this must be done manually anc carefully. Therefore, this component is best for websites which are looked after by something like a professional team, or at least a very dedicated admin or editor.

Concerning instalation: Several users have experienced problems making Custom Properties work. They report an alert "Component not configured: missing fields" where the Search-module should appear. The reason is: The search module appears correctly only when there is at least one "field" (or say: "search criterion" or "group of tags") defined. You do this in CP's "Manage fields" area. And the field must be set to "published". Otherwise you get he error message instead of the module.

You also should carefully read the installation instructions provided on the author's website. There you find many important or helpful details. This compensates, to some extent, for the missing "help" texts in the component.

I am giving it a "good" instead of "excellent" because of the missing help and, reportedly, some problems with support.

I was looking for a simple component to send various categories of newsletter to various categories of (registered or not registered) users or subscribers. I had got considerable experience with other tools (not joomla based) such as the stand-alone tool "phplist". I find AcyMailing Starter amazingly rich of features. There is virtually nothing which you can do in phplist which AcyMailing Starter cannot do (let aside cron jobs for which a commercial version must be purchased from the authors). The difference is: managing the processes, setting up nice templates, importing addresses etc. is much, much easier with AcyMailing Starter. Everybody who has some experience with Joomla components will get along with it very, very easily without additional support. (And if support is needed anyway, there are helpful "help" texts on click away in each situation.) I have seldom seen such a perfect extension! I also like the three html newsletter templates that are included and which can be modified according to your needs quite comfortably.

This plugin will become one of my favorites.

It gives me full flexibility with built-in google maps, for example concerning map size, map type, location to show when started, and many, many other things. A large number of settings can be made via the backend parameters. Additional settings (such as text to be desplayed with the map) can be put into the {*start-this-here*}-tag in the html code of the article. This allows even to have various maps displayed: With no specific settings in the tag, they use the default settings defined in the backend parameters; if specific settings are added in the tag, those will be used.

The map appears exactly where the tag is put into the html code. This is very convenient for positioning the map inside an article.

As for support: The author, Mike, answered my support question (concerning a parameter settings problem) in one day's time and helped me very effectively to fix it.

Thank you for this fine plugin.

This Compoment (plus a search plug-in) is an example for German engineering at its best: A solution one had been looking for for a long time, if only one had thought that something like this is possible!
The component allows to create - in a few seconds, with a few mouse-clicks - a new menu entry providing a list of database entries which, when clicked, open in a single-dataset-view. You can choose any table you want in your existing joomla database. This, so far, would not be thaaat useful (perhaps for creating in an elegant way list views of all articles, or of all registered users, or what ever is stored in the database. However, you can, of course, create also new tables in the joomla database and then display the contents through JooDatabase. In order to create additional tables you, it seems, have to use your phpmyadin tool. (It could be a solution to install, in addition to JooDatabase, another extension called com_artadminer which promises that you can execute MySQL operations inside your Joomla Backend. This would allow to add tables to the database, and then ad datasets to this table, for example from an pre-existing database.

A practical and useful plugin. I use it on two of my sites, in order to structure selected lenghty articles.

A suggestion for further improvement:
Once you switch "Article Auto ToC" on in an article (in this case: using the command in the html code of the article, the table of contents (ToC) appears always as the very first thing after the article's headline. This may be the standard solution for a ToC, however, I sometimes want to give first (i.e. directly after the headline and before the ToC) one or two lines of information what this article is about, in addition to the headline.
Hence it would be too nice if the ToC appeared not at the very beginning of the article but exactly there were you have put in the command into the code.
I do not know if this is possible, technically, but if it is possible, this would be a great asset to the plugin.

Thank you,
Kind regards,
Christian Geiselmann

I use Linkr for a year now, and I cannot imagine doing without it.

However, there is one important feature missing (or didn't I just find out how to do it?):

On multi-language pages (managed, for example, via joomfish), the header of the "related articles" section (which Linkr displays at the bottom of an article) is not object to the languae shift. So, if the header wording is set to "Related Articles" in the Linkr Plugin Parameters, then it is always "Related Articles", even on your French, German, Bulgarian or what ever pages. You cannot assign a joomfish translation to this.

Since all my sites are multi-language, I cannot really use the "related articles" function of Linkr. (Or does anybody know a workaround?)

Otherwise, as for the other function, Linkr is really essential for an easy workflow for my site editing staff.