The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

This is great because it lets you select the file and column / field you want to change. It also gives you a list of the records to be changed showing the original text to be deleted and the replacement text to be inserted in each record, BEFORE you commit the changes to the database. This means you can get a good idea whether or not it will result in the change you intended - very valuable because when doing a scan-and-replace people have a tendency to not think about how it might have unintended consequences. This is still in beta, with some quirks, but I've given it five stars because of it's usefulness, safety features, and very prompt response by the developer.

I have been inundated with spambots sending useless messages to the 'contact' form and was looking for a new form solution to use instead that included Captcha. I was interested to see that this appeared to add captcha to the existing contact form without any hacks, so thought I'd at least give it a try first. Well, blow me - it worked perfectly first time! Am delighted. Will know if it has effectively stops the spam very soon.

I had a specific reason for wanting to use this: There's a website called www.picnet.com.au/met/ that offers a fascinating mouse-eye tracking service, where it can display how people looked at your website in the form of mouse-tracks and visual heatmaps, based on the fact that quite often the mouse goes where people are looking.

To use this service (the paid version is far too expensive but I recommend at least trying the free version that requires a small link), you need some HTML inserted into the body copy of every page you want tracked. Therefore this PHP PLUGIN (use can use it for HTML too) was just what I needed, meaning I only needed to put the tracking code in once for it to automatically be in the body copy on every page. It installed perfectly and I put the HTML code in the 'after content' box so the link appears at the bottom, althugh this plugin offers four different places: In preparation, after title, before content and after content, and you can have different bits of code in each which is very flexible.

The next morning I've just been looking at my first mouse tracks and heat map overlaid on the page. Brilliant. Thank you for this simple itility that has saved me a huge amount of time encoding each of about 50 different articles.

I know when I've entered a URL incorrectly on my own website it looks pretty horrible and knew I should get round to doing something about it, but this made it really, really easy.

The only MINOR quibble was that in the parameter to enter the email address, the default entry made it look as though it would pick up a site default email address that I thought I had probably entered somewhere. When the redirection worked but did not appear to send an email I then realised I could not actually find where I might have entered a site default email address in Joomla. I then changed it to a specific email address and it worked perfectly, and instantly. Unless I've understood this incorrectly, it would probably be best to leave that with a 'generic' email address so it is obvious you need to enter your own.

But, hey, I'm being picky. 5 stars for an excellent widget, now to be an essential for all websites I manage.

This was easy to install, and intuitive enough to get going looking at data using SELECT and being able to pick Joomla files from a drop-down list, having done some SQL many years ago. It enabled me to manually update individual records too. However, I had hundreds of records to update and I wanted to use SQL for a mass update.

To my dismay, UPDATE was not listed as a valid command, but having read someone else's comment that a command worked even when not in the list, I had a go. The error messages it came back with suggested strongly to me it had not worked, and I spent some while trying to find the syntax that would work in conjunction with an SQL guide. The error messages distracted me for quite a while from noticing that actually it had successfully updated the records I wanted, in the way I wanted.

Ultimately then I'm extremely pleased with it, and it enabled me to solve a problem updating a Joomla core file that otherwise would have been very daunting to solve. It's only the confusion of error messages displaying despite having actually done what you wanted it to do that stops me giving it 5 stars.