rjspence

Reviews(15)
 
byrjspence, September 26, 2009
RokComments
This is pretty nifty. Allows for you to use your intensedebate accounts. Which is nice. I ended up not particularly liking the off site approach and purchased Jomcomments/Jomsocial for the purpose.

But if you need a good integration for off site commenting services, this would be the real deal.

Downfall is, every time you load a page, it connects to the off site service and slows down the load access times. If the off site service is having issues, you may not have a page load. That is certainly not the issue of the plug however, but I found the outside service to not be acceptable.

Nice work.
byrjspence, September 26, 2009
Phil Taylor's Blue Flame Forms
Not to bad, but I'm not big on the way it's implemented. I prefer to have things "standard" in my joomla configuration. With programs not taking off on their own and doing their own thing.

I only use GNU/Linux operating systems. And for some reason this software crashed Firefox a couple times. That and, a couple times it just hung. Would be better to keep Joomla proggies within a standard way to operate in Joomla in my opinion.

Forms are okay. Code that I viewed looked okay. This is, in my opinion geared towards someone that has never hand written a form. Which does have it's place.
Owner's reply

Hi rjspence,
Your review shows that you clearly dont understand what is going on under the hood :-)
Our extensions DO use the "STANDARD" way of doing things within Joomla, you might be confused upon first seeing our application because we HIDE the extra Joomla menus to give you MORE SPACE to work within our app (Screen real-estate is a premium), but things are still very mmuch within Joomla.
We also use standard libraries such as jQuery and xAJAX which are widely used in web applications. We dont really go off and do our own thing :-) except where we need to in order to bring you the best Forms Extension for Joomla Ever!
bfForms is developed on a Ubuntu machine using Firefox - I dispute that you would ever have issues with using this combination - I challenge you to use a new Firefox profile (to remove any extension and settings) and try again - you are the only person to report this (Maybe you should have asked for support rather than only giving our product 2 stars!??)
The output of bfForms is as close to xHTML standards as we can acheive :-) We pass all xHTML tests!
Thanks for using our application, even if you totally misunderstand how we do things...

byrjspence, September 26, 2009
BreezingForms: Trinity
This is my favorite out of the three commercial form proggies I've bought. Intuitive, good flow, code output is what I would would expect. And I do like the way it handles scripts. This is a five star form creation tool in comparison to others I've worked with lately.

Kudos!!
byrjspence, September 26, 2009
RSform!
This does pretty nice. Not bad. For decent forms, working with code, it's good.

I was looking for something that worked, produced some clean code, and was fairly intuitive without being too awful simple. This foots the bill for that and is quite usable.

3 Stars!! Good work, very usable, produces good forms.
AMBRA Subscriptions
Ambra is an excellent software. While not perfect, it's code is more on the clean side for the most part than not. At least for what code I've changed and altered. Like most of this companies product, it's more a full fledged program bundled for Joomla and not that of a hack or set of hacks to do the job.

Anyone that care to take a look at the code, or the structure, will find a fairly large underlying work and programming effort.

A big thanks for this program as it was much needed addition.

5 stars for the code, 10 stars for the professional manner in which this company operates. Dioscouri sets the bar for professionalism in both programming effort as well as their business model and support practices.
byrjspence, September 24, 2009
TODO list by foobla
Works well, keeps me updated as to what needs done daily. The only drawback is, once you plug in all that needs done, you remind yourself on every login just how slow you are. :)

That aside, I do like this and I've found having jot down all the ideas I have leads to better productivity. No excuses for the dog eating your notepad.

5 stars. Thank you for your contributions to Joomla. This will be a mainstay on my own sites as long as you continue to provide it.
byrjspence, September 24, 2009
Joomla Mod PHP
Use this quite a bit along with a couple other include proggies. This works well and I've not had any issues with it. It makes quick work out of includes and I really like the internal PHP evaluator.

Thank you for your contribution.
byrjspence, September 24, 2009
RokPad
Since Rockettheme release this, I've used nothing else. It's not perfect, but far better for my ancient work flow style. Hand work etc.. Not liking wysiwyg editors, this is a major plus for my work.

Add this plus firebug, gedit, and web developer plugins for Firefox and your down the road in style. Or style sheets.

Thanks for the code!
byrjspence, September 24, 2009
RokDownloads
Long time club member since they started. Good work for most of what they have and do. Good download software.
byrjspence, September 24, 2009
Jumi
Plugins and components come and go when I try them. Commercial or not, if they don't do the job, they are gone. If I look at the code and it looks like a four year old coded it, it's gone.

Jumi is a great work and I see no reason to not continue to improve on it. It's a main stay in the list of first installations on a joomla site.

Keep up the good work. And thank you for your contribution to Joomla.
byrjspence, September 24, 2009
Billets
Good software, excellent team of people working together to provide the best. Professional and courteous when replying to requests. A few issues with mail, but a few coding changes on my end seem to be producing results. Good work. 5 stars.
byrjspence, September 24, 2009
HIDER - Hide Content
I use this all the time along with Juga. You can do some really neat things with the tags. And without messing up your pages. Create some custom modules, call them with loadposition, wrap them in permssion tags, and there you go. Keep up the great work.
JUGA - Joomla User Group Access
I have now purchased pretty much everything dioscouri.com has for product with the exception of one program. Honestly, this is what professional support and components are. If you are a systems administrator that is used to permissions systems, working with permissions at a low level, then Juga will make complete sense to you and won't be a mind blower. While it may be a time consuming configuration to take every page, and every component, module, and available resource and designate a permission to each, it has it's advantages.

I've talked with the company and I'm pretty much impressed. You don't get this type of professional experience from all commercial components and their developers.

If you need a permissions system for Joomla that works, this would be it. However, I wouldn't get discouraged if you cannot get everything setup quickly. It's a thought provoking process configuring security permissions and certainly not for the light hearted.

Congrats to Dioscouri for Billets, Ambra, Juga, and some of the free software such as Hide.

And please do add Google Checkout and a few other merchant pugins for Ambra. Yours sales will improve.

Thanks again for your diligent work. 5 Stars from myself, If I could give more I would.
byrjspence, September 22, 2009
Your idea is good, love the simplistic approach. But the real issue here is just what was written.

1) You have a list now of all the logins and no way to purge the list. I had to do this manually in the database. Not good and this should be priority number one. There need be a way to purge the list.

2) Grouping. You need to group IP by login or username. This was also mentioned with the other review. If I login 400 times, this should only show under my username. Not all mixed and mashed in the same page with all other IP. So some grouping is needed here.

Other than that, I like it. But it is close to unusable without being able to purge some data. And no one really wants to do this manually, it's to time consuming.

Would like to see these improvements, this could be a very useful tool.
byrjspence, September 20, 2009
IP filter
This is very nice for what it does. Not quite exactly what I need, but a good start to something neat. I wrote you about the ideas.

Keep up the good work.