The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I have to give this an Excellent because of the amount of time it ultimately saved me. However there was an issue that was not properly handled with this extension:

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All tables must have the collation of utf8_general_ci , and all applicable columns within those tables must have that collation as well.
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The jUpgrade script should alter the talbes and columns for you, maybe that could be a future update? Before I changed all tables to that collation I was able to go through the upgrade process, however it did not pull over menu items or extension positions. So I changed the collation, ran it again, and everything worked perfectly.

Two things that I was very displeased with:
-Asking for my address on registration
-Sending back my password in plaintext (which means they store it in plaintext)

This is easily the best extension available for Joomla. It is the first extension installed on every single site I've built, and will do so in the future. To bad it's not part of the Joomla core, no one should be using the built-in editor with this one available.

I created an account just to write this review, and will be doing so with other extensions because I'm sick of poor coding practices with extensions I purchase.

The biggest fault of this extension is the fact that the templates it comes with are actual Joomla templates. Do not expect to integrate this in a pre-existing site or template and have it look good. You have to use their full site template. It makes no sense, so now I'm spending extra time making it look presentable. I know I can't expect it to look perfect with my template out of the box, however it is completely broken.

A second problem with the template is that it is built with tables. Every part of this component, and it's included modules, are tables. This is not acceptable.

Another problem: none of the tables, rows, or columns are uniquely named. I cannot use an external stylesheet to change various aspects of this stylesheet because nothing is given a unique class name. So now I'm going through the view files and adding my own. Why should I have to do that when I actually paid money for this?

Lastly, the way image uploads are handled. You have to go to a separate screen to upload images, which is fine, however it dumps everything into one huge dropdown. Lets say you have 100 cars with 10 images each. That creates a 1,000 item dropdown list that you have to go through every time you want to assign a new image. Also, there is a character limit to the file names, however it is not mentioned anywhere.

I'm not going to give this a "poor" rating because it does work, however the coding behind it is dismal. The authors need to read a book on coding practices and CSS before they decide to sell another extension.