It does work, and I do use it, but the website is entirely in German, and it comes with no instructions.

Installation was easy enough: Standard Component installation, and I figured out how to create a feed. But, then how do I get this feed on my frontpage?

Thanks to WBD for the help (see URL below):

http://www.websitesbydesign.com.au/blog/2007/12/06/getting-joomla-rd_rss-component-working/

It does only RSS 2.0 feeds (unlike the Syndicate module that does five different feeds), and you have to create your own module, and then wrap the RSS URL into HTML code. You also have to get an RSS feed icon too. (Fortunately, Joomla! comes with one and you can access it via http:///images/M_images/rss20.gif).

One the plus side, it does allow you to pick and choose which categories you want to include in your feed. Plus, you can create multiple feeds -- each with their own mixture of categories. For example, you could have a "blog" feed vs. a "picture of the day" feed, vs. another feed that includes everything. And, as WBD shows, since it doesn't create a front end for you, you're free to design it anyway you'd like.

Download the pictures into a directory, create your story and add

{gallery}image_directory{/gallery}

to your story. That's it. Thumbnails are automatically created and displayed. Clicking on the left or right side of the picture advances to the next or previous picture. User interface is obvious and well thought out.

Directions and documentation is excellent. However, there are some minor limitations:

* No picture order: The pictures are displayed in alphanumeric order. You can't specify the order.
* No resizing: Thumbnails are created automatically, but the picture images display as actual size. We had to resize our images because they were too big.
* No comments. Only the file name is displayed.
* No layout options in the thumbnail gallery. Thumbnails are displayed depending upon the width of the webpage.
* Can take a while to load. Thumbnails are created on the fly.

Obvious you can't use this for a site that is selling paintings, but for most sites, this works great.I'm quite happy with it.

Can't get much easier:

* Install Mambot
* Setup your folders
* Download your files (optional)
* Add the right mambot extensions in your article.

AllVideos Plugin also allows you to play videos hosted on remote sites which can save you quite a bit of bandwidth.

Only one minor k'vetch: The mambot assumes the file extension. That is, if your file is foo.mp3, you put it in as {mp3}foo{/mp3}. Unfortunately, if you're on a Unix system, and somebody called the file foo.MP3, you can't get the file to work until you make the suffix lowercase. It would be nice if AllVideos could detect the suffix instead of blindly adding it to the filename.