The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

- Easy to setup: though setting up a store does take time, this system has a logical way to go about it
- Great way to setup attributes for the products and to either add, substract, set a new price or not affect the price at all of a given product.
- Good selection of language files
- The template system looks ok, although the default template does use only tables to set up the structure of the page. Tables are a messy system to set up a page structure but I guess that it is the easiest way to not affect the rest of the CSS of a given site.

The two most difficult aspects of a store are the payment and the shipping process. I'm still testing the level of integration I can manage on this two fronts with this system. I'll report my findings later

The level of functionality of this system is great, none of the free system we tried do what Billets does with such level of ease

.-The initial installation and configuration process is easy

.- The interface of the system is well thought out

.-The system is a joy to use in the front end, provided that you have a modern browser ( we have tested in Safari, Mozilla, Chrome, IE 6 -7 -8)


There are a number of issues that make it very hard to implement for a large client:

.- A minor complaint is that this component need a wide template to work, it does not handle left or right columns and the configuration options does not allow for elements to be hidden by the administrator

.- Billets relies in JS to check and process forms data, not in the back end. We think this is not the way to handle a mission-critical system like this. IE8 simply does not work with Billets if the quircks mode is on.

.- Billets is not translation friendly: fields with special characters default instructions to english. In general you do have to bend over backwards to get a full translation in the core of the product

.- Itemid's are not well supported in this product, hence it was impossible to get modules and templates to work as they should. We had to write cases in the templates themselves to handle it and put the code for the ItemID in core files of billets as well. we did not get all the instances needed

.- Some elements in the system are handled by the core of the APP and not the templates: you will lose your work once the system is upgraded

.- there are some bugs still around, they do answer to support request and do somehow frequent releases but not always solve all the issues.

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In the end Billets will work for you out of the box in an expedient manner if you are not very detail oriented, but expect to spend at least 2 weeks getting it to work in an existing site if you need a languaje other than english or are trying to make it blend with the original design of the site.