dianascherff
Cons:
1. Books can only be placed in one category, even though publishers may list a book in two or more categories (e.g. Fiction, Romance). You have to add a book once for each category, creating duplicates. There isn't even a "copy" button, so you have to retype everything. It does, however, allow you to add more than one author to each book...
2. The lower row of tabs when adding a book are not visible if you click on the upper tabs, but one of them is required (Book Writers). It doesn't become visible until you click on it (which you can still do even though you can't see it).
3. I don't use one of the WYSIWYG editors, I use the "no-editor" option, but this only saves if I have TinyMCE as my editor. It's just a glitch, but needs to be corrected.
4. There should bee a separate table/list view setup. You can choose what shows now, but there should be separate view options for tables and for the detail page. The table is currently too wide for my site, but if I remove items, I will also remove them from the detail page, which I don't want to do.
5. The tabs, when adding a book, should be re-arranged. All of the required fields should be on the first tab at least, because right now language and author are on separate tabs, but they're both required.
Pros:
1. This extension is very specific to books, so if you're not really picky about features, it's a great tool for a smaller collection of books. Larger collections may be too cumbersome to set up and navigate.
2. When you view a category list or even a book's details, you can always click on a link to the publisher, author, or category listing to find similar books.
3. The link field is great for Amazon Associates or a similar link, or just a link so your visitors can easily buy the book or read more about it.
I don't think it's worth $30 just yet, but I do think this extension has a lot of potential.
Best comment system I've tried yet!
I tried ReMOSitory since it was packaged with my installation. It was fine at first. I could quickly manage permissions by basically allowing access to just the user and the admins. Unfortunately, my host didn't like how long it took to run things and kept shutting it down. I couldn't make any changes except through phpMyAdmin.
With VFM you don't have to add files, they're added simply by puting them in your download directory which saved me many hours of work. If you're new to Joomla and you just need something that works, without lots to configure, this is a great extension and since it's in Ajax the page doesn't have to refresh every time you make a change so it's quick.
There are down sides, however. With 500+ folders, 2000+ files and 480+ users, it's going to be very time consuming to set up the proper permissions. It just might be easier for me to write my own code where permissions are involved. This isn't just a VFM problem though, it's really most extensions availble that requre permissions. I wish there was quicker way than having to set each folder's permissions one by one, other than doing an SQL query in phpMyAdmin. For instance, I want to deny all guests, deny everyone who doesn't own the folder, allow all administraters "management" access, and then individually apply "view" access by user. That would be ideal.
I really like the layout, it fits perfectly with my site without any modification because it's simple and clean. It would be nice if the developer had a working website, demo, video as mentioned, and documentation. Feature requests: if the user doesn't have permission to access any files, I'd prefer it just told them they didn't have any files rather than showing a blank page with "Category" and "File" floating aimlessly. It'd also be nice to have a backend administration so I don't have to work in two places. I'd also really like to see the file count in the administration area -- I'd like to know if a folder is accidentally empty at the very least.
Hi,
Thanks for your review.
I'd like to announce a new functionality that allows to customize permission by coding your own plugin/mambot.
check out here:
http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/vfm/scmsvn/?action=browse&path=%2Ftrunk%2Fplugin_vfm_perm%2F
note that this only works with the latest version 1.0.6b, if you want to upgrade please make sure you test throughout. (some has changed/added)
I would prefer a better layout though. If I need to select a lot of files, clicking all those little check boxes drives me nuts. I also don't like that it uses a bunch of icons and the only way to know what they are is to hover over them. I prefer words, I don't have time to hunt for things. I would also have preferred a .zip file option when downloading. I can't open .tar.gz without downloading additional software so I had to install it to see the files.
I've tried to upgrade to 3.42 but it gives you one or two changes to get the download right (which is impossible with internet explorer most of the time) and then you're out of luck. "Sorry" and you have no download option despite the fact that you haven't downloaded anything.
I have 500+ folders with 1-6 folders in each plus 1-20+ files in each of those and without bulk upload/add whole structure from server there's no way I can use this extension despit all the work I've put into modifying the way it looks. The fact that it's pre-packaged [with my web host?] gives me the impression that it's much closer to perfect which it's defintely not.
You should try version 3.44. There has been extensive testing of the two bulk upload features which have been merged into a single, more flexible facility.
There's an FAQ at http://www.remository.com explaining how to configure IE to avoid download problems. The feature of limiting the number of times the same file could be downloaded was introduced by popular request, and I like to demonstrate the features of the product in my own use of it. When people reporting the issue with IE to me, as well as writing the FAQ, I also changed the configuration to increase the number of download attempts permitted. And it's only a limit for one day, after all!
Version 3.44 also has new options to configure the display without program changes, but it is inevitable that some people will want more variation than can be reasonably handled through parameters. There is also a FAQ on how to hack Remository, and I usually give information to anyone who asks how to achieve any particular change (subject to time).





