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carin

Reviews(4)
 
bycarin, March 6, 2012
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
ohanah
It is unfortunatelly quite a sad review I have to write. Nevertheless I hope other users will find the pros and cons helpful while figuring out whether or not Ohanah suits their needs. Though a warning must go first: The company Beyounic SA who is behind Ohanah is very dangerous for people who make a living from setting up Joomla websites for clients. They dont care about their customers who trusted them by purchasing their support and if they dont like the way a customer questions their product, they turn ruthless and irresponsible. They cut customers off from the forum and deny any communication even when you are in the middle of a project. They dont care about the time you took to write many bug reports and feature suggestions. This company nicks a lot of your time.

Pros:
- installs fine
- the extension does not require url_fopen
- the front end look and feel out of the box is pretty good
- as long as one doesn't change anything it works more or less
- after getting familar with the unconventional back end it is easy to handle since there are not many features to manage
- support is quick, although not always helpful
- one gets a refund easily when asking a bit deeper about some major issues the software has, but that does not bring back the lost time

Cons:
- the front end look and feel can not be changed easily and sometimes not at all since things like " | @" are hard coded into the core files without any surrounding elements so one can not even hide it with e.g. display:none, not to mention changig colour or font-size
- they even use line breaks for design purposes which is at first an embarressing rookie mistake and secondly requires the designer to fiddle around with negative margins, only chance to get around this in a decent way is to code template overrides - how many Joomla users have skills to do that? but at least it is possible
- no front end editing
- right now it does not work with https (hopefully they applied my fix in the next version)
- front and back end are very very buggy with the German language installed
- prior to purchase I aksed explicitly for a German translation, they said it is there but forgot to mention that the translation is incomplete and the backend falls apart
- its quite expensive for the features it offers compared to the freely available event managers
- it is in a late alpha status with not too small bugs but their marketing slogan states "bleeding edge" code ...
- Ohanah is an event registration extension hence obviously requires the website visitors to login which involves on many websites a SSL connection. But the "bleeding edge" coders simply forgot to test the extension with https ... at least the supprt can tell the customer where to digg into the core files of this extension to correct this bug
- the support forum is closed for non customers, one can not read the complaints of their customers prior to purchase
- instead of solving bugs the support reminds customers to stay calm and friendly, IMHO it is already very rude to take money for alpha versions
- customers are abused as testers
- right now it does not work with the Joomla standard editor CodeMirror
- the front end does not really adopt the template style, needs a fair amount of tweaking to blend in nicely
- the backend is utterly counter intitive
- emails to website customers are allways send in html mode, no option to send plain text
- no html editor for the html emails available, so you need to write html code into the email templates
- the backend does not use the Joomla controls and buttons which is very confusing and bad for usability
- the skills of the programmers are a bit dubious since they haven't got a clue what e.g. a "protocol independend link" is, I as a designer had to teach them how to solve their https bug with that
- the "feature request" section of their forum has more threads than the sections regarding other stuff ...
- they dont care about privacy, you can not have a nick name in the forum
- many HTML errors in front end and back end, even their own public demo throws 171 errors (in firebug)
- it is built on top of the nooku framework, which at first I thought is a good thing but now obviously isn't and maybe that is the reason for the buggy status

I din't expect Ohanah to be bugfree but I found around twenty bugs within two days past installation. After a while I just couldn't afford to spend more time on bug reports than actually getting my customers project to work. But do not expect any appology for the countless bugs you have to solve in that paid extension. They take your suggestions and time for granted and still cancel your account when ever they feel it suits them. And one more hint: Do not question their business practice or rise your tone to express your disappointment. They simply close your account with no announcement and your stuck in the middle of your project. It happend to me despite I never used any offensive language although direct wording and now Im in the Ohanah trap. I lost a good amount of reputation since my client trused me when recommending Ohanah for his website. Luckily this specific clint of mine is a tecky and after a look at the code he agreed to take Ohanah off in favour of a decently coded extension.

This experience brings the idea to one's mind that companies who offer commercial extensions should go through a certification process to protect Joomla users from wasting time and money. Unfortunately this is probably not manageable.
Owner's reply

Hello carin,

we tried our best to help fix the issue you where having, and after you asked for a refund, we did it straight away, that's why you didn't have access to the support anymore as this is tight in with our sales system.
Anyway we went further trying to reach you out by email and updating you account so that even after being refunded you still have access to our support, but with no lack of answer from your side. We still there waiting to help you out so just get in touch on our support system, we are more then happy to help you out.

bycarin, March 1, 2012
InterExt
Thank you for making this plugin available to the "noncoders", and even freely. This is a must have in my toolbox from now on. Installs flawless and works out of the box.
bycarin, November 7, 2011
Accordeon Menu CK
Before this one I tried a commercial extension accordeon with a lot of frustration. Then CK recently came up with his module. It simlpy works like a decent mod should do. But most impressive is the support via his forum - in the rare case one would ever need support for that self-explanatory module. Plus he listens to the users! Thanks!
bycarin, May 17, 2011
Pro Accordion Menu
I bought this extension because I needed a very quick solution. Soon after trying to install the module it became clear that it would have been quicker to code it myself.
You pay a regular price of $26, yes twentysix! for a bunch of not easy to understand code lines. You expect at least the support would be brilliant at that price level - nope, on their forum I had to wait at least 3 days or a week for a reply. You expect excellent code with that price tag - nope, just messy. What about compatability and testing - nope, they weren't even aware of that their code breaks on PHP 5.3. What about communication - almost, they try and English might not be easy for Vietnamese people, but if they sell high price, they should be able to deliver "high price" as well.
My conclusion: I never again do business with that company.
Owner's reply

I don't think you are a customer at our site. As you can see at our forum post, we reply within a day for all commercial extensions. So to make it clearly, please give us your username at our site, your forum post then people can check the truth