The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

This extension is deceptively powerful. Adds wonderful energy to our pages with a crazy zoom in effect on a graphic menu. Basically the menu graphics/icons expand like you're examining it through a fish eye lens. As each item is hovered over the menu bulges out, and the text link under it is revealed.

It is simple to use, you can experiment with the effects of how much and what way your icons are enlarged, and how small they are to start with. Change the colour of your link etc.

The plugin comes will a whole bunch a useful, and inspirational icons, to which you can add you own. They are automatically selectable from a drop down for each individual menu item.

The Menu works horizontal or vertical, a simple choice in the control panel. The only limitation is that you can only have 7 menu items, but it is not hard to edit the code to add more, and the support at Ninja were very helpful when I asked for assistance.

The CSS is exhaustively commented.

The menu still works if javascript is switched off, but without the special effects.

All in all five stars for a seamless, fast, simple and professional way to funk up joomla navigation without the need for flash, recommended.

I have been testing this for a couple of weeks.

This is a mod that has been long overdue. The Ninjas have surpassed themselves with this one. Do you have people using your joomla site whom you wish to have complete control of articles, or just their own articles or points in between, and you don't want them going into the back end where they can accidentally do untold damage? Your prayers are answered. I don't know about anyone else, but I have had to devise all sorts of laborious work arounds to half enable what this mod can do on the front end.

In short it gives absolute back end control of articles on the front end. It works perfectly on first install with no issues at all. e.g. Those irritating moments when a client creates an article and forgets to allocate a category, and "loses" their article are no more, same goes for deleting an article, easy peasy - simple pimple, oh the joy! Just the time saved supporting clients who don't have access to the back end justifies shelling out for this one. Add to it all the other great extensions available from ninja for the price of membership, makes it a real no-brainer.

One can even use it as a training tool for clients in how basic joomla works, without initially giving them back end access.

I have tested it to the extreme, it works seamlessly with joom!fish which is absolutely fantastic, as I have to work often in three languages as standard, front end translations no-problem at all.

I have enjoyed using an 'admin' template just for this feature (using the menu item > template) so the client really feels like they are in the back end rather than editing on the page, which if you have a narrow main content area is recommended.

I really can't praise this highly enough, and quite frankly I really don't understand why this is not a standard joomla feature.

It may be in beta, but even as a beta 5+ stars, and deepest thanks to Ninja for making one of the most useful contributions to client side usability I have found since I started working with Joomla. Go get it, you will not regret it.

One happy bunny. =8¬)

Thanks for get tis sorted. It is very helpful, as I am building a site for a translator who lives in the USA. Very small thing but this translations comes with a Union Flag rather than the Stars and Stripes.

NB. Google does not judge the location of a website based on the language used. Consider for one moment that the USA is a multi lingual country, and as many people speak Spanish as there are English speakers. Google uses three things to determine the location of a website. Primary is the suffix...e.g. co.uk second is the IP address of the server, and lastly the location of the registered owner of the domain. The language is irrelevant. Of course if some one is looking for color and not colour, that could in theory be a problem... but I think you will find that google's algorithm is a bit more sophisticated that that. It will look for color and colour. That's how it will ask you if you are sure you have spelt far more complex words correctly. Do a search for "The Colour of Money" and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, thanks again for the Amercianisation very useful, when dealing with... Americans =8¬)

I give this five stars, allowing for the fact it is in beta (if this was finished product 3 stars). This component is simple to install, joomla user friendly. It seems kind of bizarre to have what is effectively a content management system inside a content management system, but it certainly fills some gaps, and has helped me to expand an online magazine that I am migrating slowly but surely to joomla.

There are a few "fine details" in the beta version, which are assured are to be resolved in the stable release, which is scheduled we are told any day now.

I highly recommend getting to know K2, I had hundreds of articles in many sections and categories, I have migrated everything structure intact using a script freely available from the community. If you download the beta, scout around the forum for a patch which fixes a few oddities, save yourself a few hours of 'what am I doing wrong?" followed by the sore forehead you find it LoL

Download, install and have a play, it has a very shallow learning curve, well worth the little effort required. Kudos to joomlaworks

This is a fine mod. Great bonus is that it avoids the large calendars that seem to be the focal point of other event manager propositions. This is really neat and tidy, out of the box clean to look at, and it is not hard to give it a tweak with styles, though it hardly seems necessary.

All the features work as expected, the list does require some hand management, date and time automatic publish and unpublish options for events are not available, that would be very helpful.

The front end admin works very well with a little planning, but there is no way for a publisher to delete or unpublish an event, which would be nice to have.

Another tweek that would be nice is a way for the events that are archived to be accessible by a publisher from the front end.

Finally, a last thought that would make an excellent mod even better, is a slightly more versatile top level listing, room for an Icon sized image and short teaser text, would add a little sparkle. As it is works well, but perhaps a touch dry.

All in all absolutely perfect, bug free thus far. If you want to have a matter of fact, nicely designed, ungeeky events page, which is easy to manage even from the front end alone, with some careful prep.

Easy to use back end, same goes for the "end user" front end, combined with the mini calendar add on, which is a must really, this mod is packed with other great features I have yet to tap, it's solid gold and deserves a donation.

Minor limitations (as listed) aside, five stars.

This mod is an absolute god send. Like all new things it takes a little getting used to, but the support from the developer Peter is better than any support I have had from paid developers. He deserves every donation he gets.

The long and the short of it is that you really can customise your menu styles, link by link if you should so wish, in a way to my knowledge completely impossible in a standard joomla! install. I am using the latest version of joomla! to date (Version 1.5.9).

Joomla is a fantastic tool, but a simple desire to stray just a touch from the golden path, turns a nice design into a compromise.

For example: You have a menu item, you want a line break, and to have the first line in bold... seems simple enough does it not? The menu is working great without it... how the heck do you put that 'little style change' in position. Ummm.. Well to be honest, use this mod.

The mod admin interface is well commented with help bubbles all over where needed, the associated forum at the developer's site contains plenty of questions you may have, which already have answers.

I was a little surprised at the lack of documentation, until I asked a question late one night, and in the morning it was answered, a follow up question in the day (europe time) was answered so quickly and accurately, the need for documentation faded away.

This plugin does exactly what is described, I have found no clashes with anything else... all in all 100% thumbs up, I am looking forward to trying out some other of this chap's mods.