The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

johnlewisdesign

Reviews(8)
 
byjohnlewisdesign, February 1, 2012
Ozio Gallery
Works brilliantly every time. Not even that hard to teach someone, and looks great. It appears martinjbull cannot differentiate rating a component from rating his own skill (CHOWN is all you need sir!), please disregard his unfair rating, it works great!

Thanks alexred, brilliant work that should be 100% 5 stars IMHO!
byjohnlewisdesign, January 31, 2012
MailChimp integration for Joomla!
I needed a 'no hassle' newsletter signup that integrates with the core Joomla registration...this just stands head and shoulders above the competition. It marries the best bulk mailer to the best CMS, which makes it super powerful for me, and takes things to the next level.

Great work from Pete and the FreakedOut team as per usual. Top notch!
byjohnlewisdesign, November 24, 2011
FLEXIcontent
I installed this after trying many different options to make myself a microblogging type platform for the frontpage.

Not a single component I tried allowed comments to appear expanded on the front page by default - including this one.

I posted this on the Flexi forum and within a few hours the dev came back to me with a detailed and VERY SIMPLE hack to achieve my goal. I tried it, and hey presto, perfect!

I cannot believe how clearly this is coded, and how attentive the developer is to his customers. Wow!

If I could give 6 stars, I would. Highly recommended. And thank you so much to the dev, who continues to excel himself every time! Simply brilliant.
byjohnlewisdesign, November 24, 2011
Phoca Guestbook
This extension appears perfect for the job - very well put together, its quick, looks/functions great.

However, every site I install it on gets targeted by spammers within days. They don't reach the front end of the site as its set to require approval - but I've been suffering at least one spam an hour from every site its installed on, despite having ReCaptcha up and running.

This is seriously frustrating. I've had 2 complaints from clients, who, like me, don't have time to battle this imminent spam torrent. Simply put myself and clients have extra work to do now moderating spam every few hours. This is simply not acceptable.

If the spam issue was addressed (!out of the box!) I would give it 5 stars. As it curently stands, I'm not exactly queuing up to use it on my next site...

1 in 7 posts on Phoca's Guestbook forum are about spam. 665 posts. Of my last 7 emails received to my main inbox, 4 are spam from Phoca guestbook - from just ONE site.

Phoca should really nail this problem. Its hurting their otherwise perfect software.
Owner's reply

Hi, every new version of Phoca Guestbook gets some new feature of specific spam protection. I am using different products (forums, comments, etc. by external application) and everyday I fight spam - all website inputs made by different application get spammed, see:
http://www.phoca.cz/documents/3-phoca-guestbook-component/436-trying-to-prevent-from-spam

I am using phpBB and it is great software, I have installed over 8 different spam protection methods there and get about 10 spams per days there and over hundreds attempts to spam it. phpBB is great software and I will never review it bad because of some stupid spammers (who of course are allways ready to cross every spam protection - as mostly spam is done by human spammers)

So yes, every new version gets new spam protection methods but ... just read the article mentioned above :-(

Jan

byjohnlewisdesign, April 13, 2011
Product Slideshow for Virtuemart
Really REALLY simple to install and set up - was up and running in under 30 seconds! Runs very smooth and without issue.

For future development, one thing I would love to see is an option to hide products with no image. I'm sure this is probably a simple query, which would be invaluable for the site I'm using it on. The products with missing images come up first so I have to unpublish them.

But I cannot fault this, its brilliant. And FREE! wow. Thank you, I'll get a donation over as soon as poss ;-)
byjohnlewisdesign, March 24, 2011
Newsletter Subscriber
I installed NS when I had no sendmail available under IIS. I was able to get it running in an iframe within an HTML holding page, customised exactly to my needs, and writing subscriptions to a text file - all within minutes.

First I thought it wasn't sending mail but I was wrong! It was working perfectly - my client checked the wrong mailbox! It picks up Joomla's setting and even works with SMTP.

I contacted Christopher to assist on this, and he was back to me in a few hours to check it was all ok, which of course it was. His communication is excellent, as is his coding, I cannot fault him. I will be checking his other paid products in future, I recommend you do too!

Highly recommended if you want to save yourself a headache. Thanks Christopher!
byjohnlewisdesign, November 17, 2010
SoundCloud Latest Tracks
Excellent stuff, works perfectly, and set up in a heartbeat! The only one small thing that stopped me rating 5 stars was there's no 'module class suffix' field in the module edit page.

I'm sure this is easily remedied though, and will not even matter to 99% of users.

Highly recommended as the best and easiest option for displaying up-to-date SoundCloud info on your Joomla site, whether the suffix field is there or not. Bravo.
byjohnlewisdesign, October 4, 2010
BlastChat
I've been looking for a chat solution for some time now that (1) looks good, (2) runs fast, (3) will please users, and (4) doesn't require Flash, so can be used on a smartphone.

Blastchat is a great component/module/plugin pack, once you're set up its very easy to work out and runs itself. I had a small 'bug', which I went to the forum to fix, the admin/developer saw my post within 20 mins, asked me for a URL, and come joined me on my site!

He diagnosed my version was out of date in seconds, and hung around whilst I updated it. This fixed the problem instantly, and my users DIDN'T EVEN LOSE THE CONNECTION whilst it updated!! Just a refresh, away we go.

I cannot thank him enough, and cannot recommend it enough.

One thing I'd LOVE to see - an IRC connector so we could self host! That would ROCK. Oh and an iPhone skin!

Give it a try, you won't regret it.