The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

Webmanó for Joomla-president!
Manó his Sobi2 plugins and modules are not only useful and unmissable for your visitors, but they are also great for SEO. If you use Sobi2, you MUST use this great plugin! If you want to have a plugin or module changed to your needs, mail him..he will help you out. Manó deserves 5 stars and no less.

First of all: it says commercial, but on their site they suggest they also offer a free version, which turns out not to be the case. There is a currency converter to show how much the component costs in your currency, but it shows a much too low price, which is misleading.

Once you've paid, you don't automatically get a download link and it takes time and effort to get your download. After that, the support didn't answer my mails untill I started threatening.

As far as functionality is concerned, I was most disappointed. When you work with SEF url's it's of no use to you as with cannonical links. It only detects dead links in your menustructure but no dead external links. I use Eventlist, but it doesn't check on any link in any event, even with all parameters turned on. When you see the possibilities to set parameters in their video, you think it can do anything, but when you test it irl on your site, it's really disappointing. Look for 'free broken link checker' in any search engine and you will be much more happy and moreover it's for free.

This is the first component in 2 years that I'm really dissatiesfied with and for which I demanded my money back.

Jcomment offers everything you want and the support is very good. What else can I say?

Before, I used some other background plugin, which comes in a free and a paid version. This plugin had a lots of bugs and it really gave me headaches because I wanted them backgrounds so bad, but it influenced the working of my complete website in a negative way (menu not working right, screen shifting when changing page etc). The maker did its best to help me, but said it was the fault of the Rockettheme template that we didn't get it working right.

Then I came across this module. I tried it, but didn't know how to get it working. All the comments said: easy as pie. I was thinking: am I stupid or what? So I looked for further installation instructions and found some on the website. Especially the sentence 'place a module tag in your template' didn't sound familiar to me. I experimented and finally got it working!! I placed the code in the index.php file of my template and then selected the module position (user1) and I also places this code inside my template.css to make the background fixed:

/* body background */
body {
background: 0 0 fixed !important;}

The brilliant thing is now, that I can make endless copies of this module and create a personal look and feel for each and every ID of my menu. If you want to, you can make hundreds or thousands of different backgrounds for every menupoint if you like, without making things too complicated. By changing the images in the selected directories, you can regularly change the backgrounds and keep the looks of your site fresh. I'll definitely make a donation for this one!

Here are the installation instructions from the website:

Background module - installation instructions
The Background module works just like a normal Joomla module. Use the following steps to get the Background module working:

Step 1:
Install the background module via the Joomla extensions installer (Extensions -> Install/uninstall).

Step 2:
Place a module tag in your template, for example:


Important! You can place the module tag where you want in the template, but after the CSS reference line.

Step 3:
Navigate to the background module settings in the Joomla module list (Extensions -> Module manager).

- Set the right position (in this case: user1)
- Choose an image (or set a directory) from the select list in the module parameters and publish the module.

I've been using sh404sef for over 6 month now and it's safe to say that this module is potentially dangerous because it can cause your complete website to go offline because of parse errors. Only if you are familiar with the programm it's safe to use. When you need support it's there, but not to my satisfaction at all. The answers are brief and you can only ask things via the forum, where basically only one or two people are active in answering questions. I would not buy it again. Simply too complicated and dangerous.

after installing this component I thought "easy as pie", click 'start' and that's it. But it made my complete website crash. No FTP, No Email, no WWW, nothing.

Now, hours later I'm still hoping that my provider can fix this for me as there is nothing I can do myself from here.

NO component should be able to have such drastic consequences for a website, so that's clearly 'very poor'.

I was impulsive while experimenting at night, so I bought the paid version after testing the free version for half an hour to my satisfaction.

Installation and configuration can be done without having to read the manual extensively. Works right out of the box. Paid version overwrites the free version without any problems.

As 1 commenter said though, most people use the background of a website to scroll on with their mousewheel to get up or down a page. This doesn't work with mmbackground (free/paid)in Internet Explorer. It DOES work in Firefox and Safari, so it must be some bug that can be overcome!

There are only 10 fields available in the paid version for setting specific background for specific itemid's (menu's) or specific times (night/day).
I have more than hundred menu items, so it would be good if one background picture could be assigned to more than one itemid, which could be divided by comma in the existing field.

just what sobi needed! BRILLIANT

instantly working and very helpful for SEO and endusers. Be sure to read the simple instructions, because I didn't and couldn't figure out what was wrong at first: turned out, that I hadn't filled in the keywords of the sobi entries (as i do this via sh404sef). After filling the keywords, everything was working fine.

But what about a module 'related categories for sobi'??!! That would be even more helpful to me.

I rate this extension 5 stars because it's simply the best you can get and them guys are really doing their utmost. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; JP Slick Slideshow is worth a million words!

keep working on optimizing the user friendliness though, especially with the KenBurns effect.