This is a very useful component/module that worked well the first time I installed it. I was about to try to modify the comments listing module so that the number of characters in a long comment could be truncated when I discovered that the Developer had just updated the extension to do just that.

Yes, it can be a challenge to install. But this is a very feature-rich extension package that does a lot more than the above description. Once you get beyond the installation challenges, I have found it to work very well with Joomla. I am not an experienced developer - in fact I incorporated CiviCRM into the first website I designed with Joomla (which was only my second site).

While the extension is tilted towards Drupal, I have detected a strong desire and willingness among the CiviCRM development community to make it more Joomla friendly. In my opinion, the best way to do that would be to make it compatible with JoomlaPack, which would go a long way to solving the installation headaches (use of Foreign Keys in the CiviCRM database seems to prevent this - I don't pretend to understand the details behind this).

If you have the time to configure the installation, it is well worth the effort.