The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

downloaded and used acajoom news for the first time. it's best feature is that it's free. yes, if i had to pay for this component i probably would not have rated it as high, but since i didn't, i can live with minor bugs.

i had 500+ users on my list, the newsletter sent out alright, without any glitches.

love the concept of adding content from the site by use of tags.

bugs: when you're uploading a list of subscribers and you specify that they are confirmed, the system sends everyone an email asking them to confirm again. this is a MAJOR issue - i don't want to innundate my subscribers with emails when they have already opted in. whenever you upload a list from the admin side, the system should not send out any confirmations, period, i think, it should be done mannually by admin, since the process was initiated by an admin in the first place.

when you're viewing a list of subscribers and you choose to edit one, after you save changes the list is displayed from the beginning, it doesn't return to the page where the subscriber in question was found. this is a major headache, considering you might want to continue looking through the list from where you left off and now you have to paginate 20 pages just to get to where you were.

right now, you can only update one subscriber at a time, unless you use database tools and update data directly. it would be nice to be able to check/uncheck certain features (i.e. confirmed, blacklisted, etc.) for several subscribers and have a mass update.

another good to have feature (and it may already exist in the paid-for version) is to have more than one template for a list. for example, i send out a newsletter to my list of subsribers, but, ocasionally, i'd like to send out a "reminder" about certain events. by the way, having a template is a great idea. i ended up setting up a separate list (a duplicate) for my "reminder" template. the only downfall with that - duplicate administration, you can't send out emails unless you "publish" your list and then it shows up in subscription form.

another "good to have" feature would be to have an ability to send a newsletter to select group of users, not everyone on the list (i.e. newly added subscribers). right now, i suppose, you can do it via "test email" feature, but if you have 20 new subscribers out of 500 that you need to send this to, finding them in the list and sending emails one at a time makes for a lot of wasted time.

overall, component is good but not without some major bugs, since it's free, i can live with by either fixing the problems myself or creating a workaround. to all developers, thank you for spending time to create this free component, i will be looking forward to updates and fixes.

very easy to install and instantly you can see the button on your site showing you the number of links to your site. so far so good. however, the count doesn't filter out the links from your own domain, which is kind of silly. my count said 285 links to the site, when i went to check out which sites were linking to it, turned out they were all my own links! i don't know if it's a limitation of yahoo! or the mod, but, it certainly put a damper on my excitement when i thought i had 285 external links...