prilly
It also does a very neat trick: it can post a Birthday announcement in a forum. This is an optional feature, and it's easy to setup: you just enter the ID number of the forum you wish to use. I tested this feature and it works. Wow, this is a big help for web owners and forum administrators!
Thank you for a very nice Kunena extension!
All I wanted was a LIST of articles in the sidebar so my Joomla blog would actually LOOK like a typical blog. This module does that.
And, the installation is SO easy. Install the module, fill in the parameters... Kindergarten-level stuff.
I love this module.
But the new version I just downloaded is really awesome. There's no doubt this is now my favorite Joomla Gallery by far! The multiple upload feature is powerful and works without a hitch. The UI is clean and classy; I really like how my site looks with JWallpapers on it. There are lots of configuration options. And everything is laid out so it's easy to find, easy to use.
And besides being a really good gallery, JWallpapers has an inexpensive add-on for doing Photo Contests! I think it's the only program in the JED that can do real Photo competitions (which goes beyond mere votes or ratings.)
JWallpapers has been one of the best experiences I've had with Joomla extensions. It's a very good program with very good support, lots of extra extensions and strong ongoing development.
I'd give it more than 5 stars if I could. :)
However... I am surprised at all the glowing reviews because there are some problems yet with this new version. If you have a restricted or private forum for registered users only, then bad things can happen.
1. Category setup. If you have a restricted or private forum, Administrators cannot access the forum at all unless you ALSO specify the backend access. I fiddled with that a lot until I was able to get it to work. Not only do you have to specify who gets access but you MUST appoint moderators for that forum (including yourself) or nobody with an Admin ranking will be able to get in. ALSO... remember to publish the SECTIONS as well as the categories. I got so twangled up in forum settings that somehow the sections got turned off. (It's easy to get twangled when things aren't going right.)
2. When you're done setting up a new component, the last thing you do is make a MENU item link, right?? Oh, this was worst nightmare I've had in months. If you have a private forum, the MENU links won't work! I read everything in the Kunena forum, I followed all instructions and I spent 6 or 7 hours simply trying to create a menu link that didn't generate error messages. Apparently Kunena's router needs some tweaking? I don't know what's wrong but IMO, this problem should have been fixed during the BETA testing stage.
I believe this is what you must do to create a menu link that doesn't generate errors:
a. Make sure your Joomla is UP TO DATE and create a NEW Joomla menu. Create an entirely new JOOMLA menu (not a third party menu.) Don't use your old Joomla menus, make a new one. (You can copy links over to the new one.) But you need to create an all-new Kunena link, keep reading...
b. Go into the Kunena configuration and go to the CONTROL PANEL. Select the icon that says CREATE MENU. This will generate a menu link that works. You may have to search through all your menus to FIND the link that Kunena just made. It doesn't matter where it lands, you can move it to the menu you want.
c. If you have other forum links with the same unique id name, there might be conflicts. Since Kunena generates a FORUM link with the unique name of forum (which is not very unique), you may want to change it's name to something much more original. Or delete other links which have the unique name so there's no confusion.
d. It might be necessary to use entirely NEW sections and entirely NEW categories in order to discard old kunena code. I'm not entirely sure if this is right, but 7 hours of trying to create a menu link; I discarded everything that was from Kunena 1.5 in case legacy code was the problem. Some of the error messages did indicate that legacy code was the culprit. (But we all know that error messages usually have nothing to do with the real error.)
If you're successful in generating a forum menu link that works without errors, don't change it and don't touch it. If you want to try to tweak your Menu link, make a copy and adjust that instead. I found that no kind of tweaking worked no-how.
ANOTHER BIG PROBLEM: you can't link to a specific Category or Forum directly. This is a real pain because we only use one category for my Forum, but we can't make a menu link for it; not without breaking the router.
SO, I created a hard-coded link at the top of my HOME page that goes directly to the category I want, and it works without errors. But I can't set up a Joomla menu item for that category and as a result, I can't set the forum as my DEFAULT home page either, even though it's the main purpose for our family website.
I really hope the Kunena developers address this issue soon because I'm not the only one who's had major frustrations with simply making a Menu link. It shouldn't be this hard, it really shouldn't.
Hi prilly,
Thank you for your detailed feedback. It's great for the Kunena Team to receive such things in order to keep improving Kunena.
One point of correction: Yes you CAN create a menu link to forum categories. You just create a Joomla menu item, choose Kunena Forum, then choose Category as the type. You'll have a selection there of all your forum categories to choose from. Very easy. If you had posted a question on the Kunena Support Forums about this, we could have pointed you in the right direction (you're a registered user, but haven't made a single post yet). If you post your issues there, our great team will be happy to answer any other questions you might have and save you lots of time!
Thanks for using Kunena!
There are plenty of parameters so I could get just what I wanted for my menu. It seems to me that the code in this module must be very good because it was super-easy to install, with great results immediately. I was actually surprised it was so easy.
I wonder if ARTCATS is ready for Joomla 1.6 because it appears to allow nested categories too.
Very nice! All thumbs up!!
I thought it would be an easy project, but wow, I was wrong. Finding the right gallery was frustrating. Some of them cropped the thumbs so only noses and teeth were showing. Some didn't allow captions. Some could only handle 20 photos at the most before they bogged down. Hours of work, installing many modules and plugins, and I had a really lousy photo gallery to show for it.
This morning I noticed SPGM and since it mentioned there were a lot of configuration options, AND it's lightweight (I tend to bog down my Joomla sites with too much heavy stuff), I decided to try again.
I was very delighted with the results! SPGM can handle a few photos or a lot of photos, gracefully. Uploads are incredily easy, you can see everything you're selecting. It's fast. Thumbnails are automatic. Lots of configuration options for captions and titles, rows and columns, thumb sizes and photo sizes and slideshow.
The spgm.conf parameters file is available in the back-end admin area of SPGM... look for the THUMB photo that's named spgm.conf (it's underneath the list of galleries.) This was the only odd thing I found about the program: the parameters file was hard to find and I almost missed it. I think it should be listed in the upper right with the other menu items, where parameters icon is usually found. So that's why I'm telling you where to find it.
Just click on the spgm.conf thumbnail and you'll find lots of options to tweak - and then save the file. Very easy! I had to play with the options a bit until I got the results I wanted on the front end.
I also adjusted the spgm.css file a little, and now everything looks great.
SPGM is very easy to work with, and provides an attractive gallery. I'm sure I will be using this very NICE gallery solution for many more projects.
Thanks for that and good suggestion re the spgm.conf file - that should quite easy so watch out for a new release in a few days.
Amazingly easy to configure, too. To set it up, simply create a menu item for the component. The parameters are listed in the menu item. That's it.
What you get is a User Console for the front end, that shows all of the articles that were submitted by the logged in user. They can edit, copy, publish, unpublish their own work, as long as they have Author or Editor privileges on the site.
And, they can create a new article. They can sort their articles by various filters. All of this is presented in a table that's very easy to understand and work with.
This should be part of the Joomla core, IMO.
For those who don't want to fiddle with a whole lot of settings and complicated assortment of mods, plugins, components and whatnot; this is really the way to go. Quick and simple.
Just remember to add CAPTCHA, and the last field on the list should be a button (SUBMIT is one of the button options.)
I was able to stylize my form some, by editing the css file.
What amazed me about this software is the economy of the layout. It's designed to do a whole lot in very little space.
I can't compare with other forms components since this is the first one I've used but I think I got lucky. CK Forms is a very nice component.
I was especially happy with this module because it allowed me to enter multiple Twitter IDs. I couldn't find another Twitter app that displayed info and users in quite the same way as this one. This is a very logical format.
The price is very reasonable. Thank you for a great module!
Thanks to all for such awesome reviews .Suggestions are warmly invited .Thanks again
I think there's a shortage of social-type applications in the JED, especially things that are more "feminine" in nature. So this is a real find. Perfect for an online lady's club.
VERY EASY to add new recipes from the front end!
I was amazed at all the field options, which allow for comprehensive field searching if you want to use them. Such as Cost per Portion, Gluten Free, Vegetarian, Dietary (low calorie), and many more. So there's a lot of potential, beyond the ordinary paperback cookbook, if you want to tap that potential.
I think someone who was writing a cookbook would find this script very useful for organizing and sorting.
The interface is simple in design, so it fits right into my site without any fuss.
To customize the cookbook for your site, be sure to find the language file (en-GB.com_garyscookbook.ini) and change Gary's Cookbook to whatever you want. You may need to download eXtplorer from the JED in order to do that. It's the usual problem of file permissions (caused by the Joomla installer somehow?), and eXtplorer file manager is a real lifesaver. I use it all the time on my Joomla site: can't live without it.
Very easy to customize. That was important to me, in fact that was the main reason I went looking for something other than what I had.
The database tables are simple, with all the weblinks information (category, parent category, description, title, active status etc) included in ONE table, which means it's very easy to import lists from a text file, using your favorite MySql utility.
The forms for submitting links are VERY easy. I like to keep things simple for my users so they will be more inclined to participate.
I like JVLE much better than the web-links program that is included with Joomla. And I like it a lot better than the over-complicated clunky program I struggled with for a year and finally gave up on.
I'm very grateful this program is in the JED. If I need more, I'll look at their full version. So it's nice to know I can upgrade if necessary.
Because of Zen Cart's peculiar way of doing logins, it's not possible to do the "Master Login". JFusion's Doc files explain why. But at least all my Zen Cart users are imported to Joomla properly. My customers do have to login to Joomla separately, but I think that's OK as long as they don't have to register separately.
Setup is a little fussy with JFusion, but it's worth the learning curve because once it's done, you can really walk away and forget about it. JFusion is very reliable and works flawlessly.
I used an earlier version of JFusion about a year ago: I used the VBulletin bridge. Since then, I see that they have improved installation and setup so it's much easier now. And you can install upgrades right over the existing JFusion, without having to uninstall first. I like that!!
JFusion won't be a solution for everyone. If you want to have Zen Cart as your Master program, then it's a great solution.
If you choose Joomla to be the Master program, then there are problems because Zen Cart does not have Usernames. And almost all Joomla programs need them. So if you want to setup a full social site or a bulletin board to work with Joomla, you may run into complications because none of the users will have a USERNAME. And you don't want the email Address to be broadcast to all visitors as the user ID.
JFusion allowed me to set the Joomla login for EMAIL instead of USERNAME. So it works with ZenCart without a hitch.
I am only using Joomla to add a blog, private messages, a game, Twitter link and Ecards. These are things that Zen Cart does not have and I wanted them.
If you wish to have a fully integrated Zen Cart and Joomla social site, you would probably do better with one of the fully integrated packages for Zen Cart/Joomla, which are mentioned in one of the Joomla Forum Threads.
Thank you to JFusion for such an amazing bridge program. It's one of the most awesome products in this Joomla extensions directory.
Of course I chose Chinese as my first sample language, and then discovered that I couldn't read any of the languages in the language list either, so couldn't revert back to English. (I had turned off all the flags: I didn't see the point in using them.) Now I'm using the flags, too, so I can get back to English again. :)
This is a really great module.













