First, I have to compliment Phil on his approach to support. I've had two issues so far, and in both cases he responded quickly and with relevant information. Since I didn't mind giving him temporary admin credentials he was able to jump in and resolve the first very quickly, and I discovered that the second had nothing to do with the Knowledgebase. While I can understand a reluctance to give someone admin access, my thinking was that Phil is fairly well know in the Joomla community and accusations that he is causing problems with web sites would be very harmful. Besides, I deleted the account he used as soon as he was done.

As for the component, I was a little wary when I saw his forums were removed because of spamming. I was also a little concerned about the lack of a demo that I could download. Both those issues were resolved when I learned that he has set up a secure email system and that there is a demo available on his site. While not fully functional, the demo does provide a feel for what the component can do.

I set up a knowledgebase for a customer who has 20 years of questions and answers they wanted to put on their site. I couldn't find anything else in Joomla that would let me do what I wanted. One of the selling points is that every output is based on a template and I could easily make the knowledgebase look like the rest of the site. It turned out to be harder than I thought, partially because the customer has gotten used to me delivering exactly what they want! Still, a little Smarty experience went a long way and I'm confident that my knowledgebase doesn't look anything like anyone elses. Better yet, the customer was able to organize their articles by placing them in multiple categories. And I took full advantage of the custom fields by creating fields for botanical information.

There are, however, some areas that can be improved (and I've already told Phil about them). First, the Joomla 1.0 version does not support pagination. I've got categories with dozens of articles and the pages can be very long. Also, the articles can only be displayed in the order you manually set in admin. There's no way to automatically display them in alphabetical or date order. Finally, there's no real documentation for the template variables, making it a little harder than it needs to be to modify the templates.

Overall I'm very happy (and so is my customer)with Phil Taylor's Knowledgebase. The support is very personal and the component has meet my needs. There is room for growth, which is why I'm not giving it 5 stars. Still, if you're looking for a solid knowledgebase component this should work for you.

The intent of this plugin is deceptively simple: Allow PHP (or Javascript) to run in selected positions on a page. Why would you want to? Imagine being able to tap into the Joomla database to display a menu wherever you want. With some coding knowledge you could build a home page with images that display menus when the user hovers over them. You can't do that with Joomla alone. In fact, this plugin lets you tap into the full power of Joomla and the database in any way you want.

With this great power comes great responsibility. To make any use of Jumi you need to be comfortable with writing PHP code and accessing MySQL databases. Joomla does provide some nice classes to make this easier, and the few examples on the site show how this can be done. Once you're comfortable with that, Jumi has the potential to replace many different modules and plugins. In fact, I believe it is possible to write your own page templateing system using Jumi, at least on a page by page basis.

So who is Jumi for? Not for the Joomla beginner who hasn't worked with PHP and MySQL before. But if you're comfortable writing your own code, Jumi lets you pry open Joomla's hood and work directly with the engine, allowing you to make Joomla sing to your own tune. All without hacking any core files.

This is the first commercial extension I've purchased for my site, and I must say that I'm impressed. Due to hosting limitations I haven't been able to use the full functionality but I'm working with my hosting company to allow Cron backups.

I did have problems initially, however. I read the instructions carefully but was unable to back up any files. There were a number of reasons for this, mostly due to how my hosting company had set up my account. Despite this, the developer was very gracious as he worked with me to resolve the issue. I did have to work to transfer information between the hosting company and the developer, but in the end the issues were all resolved and I was able to successfully back up my site. I never had to wait longer then two hours for a reply from the developer, and often they came much sooner. In fact, on one occasion he sent me a follow-up email with more information and something else I could try.

One reason my backup was ultimately successful was the number of backup options that are available. I ended up using the most manual process, but even that is no worse then clicking two links. If you have better control over your hosting account than I have, you can go so far as to fully automate the backups through a Cron job and speed up the process by using server utilities to tar or zip your files. Even my manual backup, with over 4000 files, took less than ten minutes. Another option that I will be testing is the ability to have finished backups automatically FTPed to another server for off-site storage. There is even the option to age backups and automatically remove the older ones.

Cloning is another nice feature. If you need to move your Joomla site to another host, simply clone it. The current site will be backed up, FTPed to the new host, and once you've entered the MySQL login information the backup will be automatically restored on the new host. This sounds like a great way to launch a live site after it's been developed in a test area.

Based on the number of backup and restore options, and especially the outstanding customer support, I would highly recommend JoomlaCloner.