dpk
You will need to understand or learn the basics of template overrides in Joomla 1.5+ but installation and customization are not difficult. The only drawback is a common one: the developer's site is cluttered, hard to navigate, and short on well-written documentation, but what you need is in there.
Bugs I experienced right away:
-JCE and other visual editors fail to load.
-Video players do not work in quiz questions in some cases, without apparent reason. For example, JW All Videos works with FLVs in intro text descrciptions that preface a quiz but not in the questions themselves.
-Response emails are not issued.
Due to the bad UI, poor English, and lack of documentation, configuring different completion screens based on results is difficult.
There is some ambiguity as to how support works. The developer's website indicates support beyond the customer-to-customer support forum requires an additional purchase. However, after purchasing the extension without additional support, I received an email (again in poor English) that seemed to be saying I had a few days of free support, but those days had already passed. I did receive some support help by email regardless, but again it was in poor English.
I was able to fix the problems I had or find workarounds, but the email notifications generated when a quiz is finished are picked off by some server-side spam filtering, and that has remained a problem.
I do not mean to be insulting by mentioning the poor English, but it does add a great deal of frustration and doubt as to the quality of an extension and the developer, the reliability of the support, etc. I do not recommend using extensions that have these problems if you are constructing Joomla sites for serious clients since they will be frustrated and it will cast doubt on the Joomla brand altogether.
Thank you so much for your review. Every opinion (whether it is positive or negative) matters for us and helps to grow and develop. Nevertheless, I’m very sorry you remained so distinctly dissatisfied with our component.
There are dozens of other customers who not only use the component, but just as well renew their subscription periodically, so it is not all bad. However, every customer is unique and might have his own point of view about what the good product is, so we are trying to do our best while solving software issues and all the complaints that are coming from our customers. This is why guys from our support group are always ready to answer any possible question that you might have about installing, tuning or using our component. So if forum happened to be unhelpful for you - hit them up with support request ticket (which is obligated to be answered in 24hrs) at http://www.joomplace.com/helpdesk/ticket_submit.php as support for you component is always free and we never ever charge anyone for it.
If the component doesn’t have some features that you need we are sorry. We will try to add them to our next releases. Many customers of ours have many wishes for a certain features and believe it or not we simply cannot implement all of it within one component since it will become huge and slow, and nobody wants that. We have a wish list at http://www.joomplace.com/forum/your-feedback-please-notice-that-support-is-closed-in-weekends-thanks/wish-list-for-components.html on our forum, that you may want to take a look at or probably even drop a line as wishes that are most requested will eventually become our next release.
By the way, the large section of documentation is coming up really soon. It will include all the detailed information on every component, and specifically on QuizDeluxe. But as long as our current Help section of the documentation is fairly small, we are always happy to assist our customers via support desk and we are trying to give them adequately descriptive answers.
I can assure you, we will do our best to make next releases of this component as good, neat and defectless as possible, so it is convenient and easy to use for our customers, whom we value so much.
These problems and solutions need to be publicized/noticed more to users, and there needs to be better explanation of the plugin parameters. The "use session" parameter is fairly obvious for what it does to more experienced Joomla users, but it may confuse others and it's not explained for how it works. The "Alternat. URI" parameter is not helpfully explained with "Use alternative method to create form-URI."
Thank you for the review, I always appreciate constructive criticism.
I know the documentation is incomplete, I'm currently redesigning the plugin for J!1.7 and implementing many feature requests. The documentation will be updated once it's finished, but I don't know which features can be backported to 1.5 yet.
This is a very valuable, needed tool. Nothing like it has been so ambitious or effective. Please support its development.
Thank you for your feedback! The latest version 1.1c (released Aug 17th) makes unix permissions configurable in the plugin backend configuration panel (see the advanced parameters). Default values remain 755/644 for directories/files, but any other ones can now be specified.
Major Flaws:
*Does not do a clean install/uninstall, nor can it install or update all its extensions in a single package.
*Does not use the Joomla menu manager system properly and has no menu views to create. Appears to have major itemID issues which cause pain with common menu systems, core SEF and other SEF systems.
*Non-MVC and default views are extremely poor HTML/CSS.
*Backend interface is extremely cumbersome and poorly designed, making it difficult to manage a big repository with moderately complex permission rules.
*By default files are stored in the database as BLOBs. This is a unique feature, but for various reasons it should not be the default.
*Default icon set is unattractive old Mambo icons.
I would dispute much of this, and note that the author declined to reply to my email request for more and better details of his claims. A lot of this is opinion and ignores the fact that very many people find Remository a highly functional and valuable application. If the author has specific problems, I can only wonder why they have not troubled to raise them, since Remository has a busy forum as well as a robust ticket system for support.
As is, version 1.3 will break good, properly designed tableless templates, and it will probably not function well with any temoplate using overrides to replace the core/default com_content page output.
To make a quick fix you will need to remove the table width attributes hard-coded into the plugin's HTML output and remove the table/tr/td tags it inserts (and never closes) at its end.
I agree that the output need some work and I stated before that the plugin would break -at the time being- any template using overrides. I am working on a solution that would give the user the ability to edit the code from the backend or to choose default mode for overriden templates or default templates. Just the exams and life are keeping me away now.
You can check my idea on my blog:
http://www.alfystudio.com/blog/64-calendar-stamp-and-template-overrides.html
Thanks for the useful review and If you have any idea or thought that would help improving the plugin I hope you don't mind sharing it, I am all open to discussion :)
Regards
http://joomlabear.com/Forum/Module-Bugs/1847-ReJoomulus-1.0.6-errors-on-J-1.5.8-1.0.7.3.html#1847
http://www.sqysoft.com/remository?func=startdown&id=1
Since AContact uses the same database tables as the core contact manager (plus a few of its own), any changes made to contact information in either component will affect the other except when it comes to contact categories. AContact categories do not carry over to the core contact categories and vice versa. This causes problems and appears to be a bug or oversight.
There is also a problem with component title redundancy so you get "A - A" as the title if the menu item for an AContent page is "A".
AContact's plugins supply its main value: allowing you to link a contact item to a video from a variety of sources and/or a google map. These can only be displayed in popup windows from a link. You can also add visual and/or audio confirmation codes on contact forms.
The category bug solved in new 1.5.4 release.
Thank's
The so-called CB "integration" for Letterman should be DROPPED and not promoted anywhere, for anyone, at all. Using it is guaranteed to make you a spammer.
The Letterman CB "integration" scheme does not integrate its subscriber list with the core/CB list. You can only create a subscription checkbox in CB (which may be included on the profile pages and at registration), but there is [b]no way to mass-manage or mass-import subscriptions[/b] for people who subscribe this way, and [b]you will receive no notice when they subscribe/unsubscribe[/b]. They cannot unsubscribe without entering their profile page, and [b]Letterman will send these people bogus unsubscription info and links (which assume Letterman's subscriber manager is being used) unless this is removed from the mail footer template, which is not a simple config option.[/b] [i]If you let people subscribe via their profiles, you cannot use Letterman's own subscriber manager because this would create an entirely different list of subscribers that would confuse the people who subscribe with the checkbox.[/i] They might try to get on both lists.
In essence this "integration" makes Letterman's own user manager unuseable unless you don't care about spamming and pissing users off on several fronts.
>:( >:( >:(
Only with extreme caution and MUCH work could you administrate this CB "integration" well. It is also a system that makes it impossible to export your subscriber list short of going into the database itself.
Another serious flaw in Letterman itself is that it uses your base admin email settings with no options for a special newsletter address, a special reply-to or bounce address. That shows disregard for proper emailing procedures and makes it harder to divide labor to different accounts and admins.