The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

In the last 2 years I've had to migrate a lot of clients to WordPress for ease of use but Joomla! is still the "better" product for advanced websites. CorePHPs Wordpress for Joomla! allows me to give my clients the best of all worlds - and it works! For anyone that thinks $69.95 is too much all I can say is it's worth every penny and I keep my subsription current. The support is great and I'm sure the time these guys have given me with my "oh geez I should have known that" questions has eaten up at least that much in their time.

I can't give this extension a total poor because I think it might be ok if you have never used any other eCommerce solutions. However, I have been using Virtuemart for several years and before that I used LiteCommerce.

I enjoyed working with "one developer" in the days of using LiteCommerce but I got tired of paying for support on top of the licensing fees etc. (they got greedy once they were successful and then dropped the product altogether and left us all hanging high and dry).

With Virtuemart I have invested a lot of money in "donations" because I am a firm beleiver in supporting developers. So, when I read the good reviews on RedShop I thought "well, if it's as good as it sounds it will be worth the $300 (on sale) annual investment.

Unfortunately it is not as good as it sounds. Once I got into it and started asking for help I got the same rudeness mentioned by others. Additionally, as I read through the forums looking for answers I discovered there are many features not yet available but "I could put in a feature request". I also found a lot of "that will be fixed in the next release".

Mostly, the sense they give you that you can easily import your products and orders from Virtuemart is not exactly accurate. It is only "easy" if you don't have child products, inventory control, attributes and extra images (oh, "that is supposed to be fixed in the next release").

When, out of frustration I emailed them explaining there were just too many problems for me and the software would not meet my needs and ask for a refund the owner said "I am offended by the fact you use all caps in your email and will not consider giving you a refund because you have given me no reason that you can support".

Personally, I think hating the software after fighting with it for more than 10 hours is enough of a reason but whatever....

Bottom line is redComponent took my $300.00 and told me to go screw myself. Even if they improve their product their attitude makes me sure I will not work with them again.

Maybe they need to invest some money into customer service training.

I have been looking at, trying and working with every classified ad program for Joomla as well as those that stand alone and this one is by far the best - yes, there are still bugs and it is still growing but the concepta and functionality (especially with the regions) is so superior to anything else out there it's worth any short term inconvenience you may experience. The developer is committed to making this work and receptive to input. He is even doing webinars now to help us use it to it's fullest advantage. If you are looking for a SERIOUS classified ad program this is the one to go with. It will not be this cheap forever - I mean it will always be open source but the support is worth paying for - I'm proud to be an early supporter!

I have been relying on Fantastico for to update my sites (because it was relatively easy) however, it generally takes at least 2 weeks for the updates to become available via Fantastico (CPanel). The, my last 2 updates from 1.5.15 - 1.5.17 did not work (the version did not update so I wasn't even sure if the update worked at all). In any case, today I discovered this extension and used it and am so happy I will install it on all of my sites. Thank you!

This really helped me out and the developer is very active on this project and interested in feedback and helping. They represent all that is good in "open source". Worth the money.

This is fine if you just want people to say they want an appointment starting at a certain time on a certain day but who makes appointments like that? Looking at the admin screen shots I thought we would be able to configure the front end appointment request form to have start and end times - or at least a duration! All this really is is a contact form that you "pre-populate" the date in by clicking from the calendar. From the back end, yes it's nice that it stores teh appointement info but even that is very limited - this should not require payment to try out - I'm only out $12.00 but this component really offers very little. Sorry.

I have installed the "free" version on one site already and am so pleased with the ease of installation and user interface I've also purchased the "Essentials" version for another site. I have tried almost every newsletter extension since I started using Joomla! in 2008, including some I paid high prices for. This is the first one to be clean and simple to use. It says what it does and does what it says. The prices are a little steep because of the value of the USD vs the EU but well worth every penny! I am proud to be a part of a community where this kind of quality developer is willing to risk spending many unpaid hours developing a "free" product without any guarantee of making money on it. I hope other web designers / developers will take the time to check this product out and support ACY so that they will continue to develop products for us.

I would give this a 5 star rating except for the support is severely lacking. I will continue to struggle with Virtuemart because I like that it integrates with Joomla! 1.5 and I love Joomla 1.5. But it is very frustrating to try to find solutions to the many bugs that you will run across. In the forum everyone is always referring to "read the manual" ... I can tell you I am a HUGE fan of manuals and thought VM was one of the best out there for an opensource project like this BUT - the manual does not address many many issues! For example, there is no place to help you with what correct permissions are - everyone says 755/644 and "make sure your ownership permissions are correct" but no one mentions that SOME files need 777 permissions (images will not work right unless I set them to 777) and when I asked what the ownership settings should be I was told "same as Cpanel... umm excuse me what if I don't know what those are? It's like the people involved in writing this stuff really don't want "joe noobie" to have a chance at it - I know a lot, but I've had to learn it from people that know more than me! If you treat me like I'm an idiot because I don't know something you think is "basic knowledge" then how am I going to improve my skills and help others that are trying to be a part of this community? And if you do not want to share your knowledge why are you working in Open Source? I share my knowledge freely and have helped many people over the years I used LiteCommerce from X-Cart - I was always happy to help the new person not have to struggle with the same issues I had struggled with. Also, in the VM posts they are always talking about the fact that it's "free" so we should not expect decent support - excuse me but I DONATE -- I think that counts as "not free". Like I say, I will continue to use VM but if you are new to all of this you may want to choose a shopping cart solution that has better/paid support because you will get a lot of attitude from the VM forums and not very timely responses to questions if any answers at all.

I can't express how much I appreciate this brilliant extension. I could make myself crazy with the i.e. Explorer issue of not liking multiple occasions of "domready" - seems like every time I add a module to a page I get an error! But with rereplacer I just say "replace domready with load" and apply and voila! My error disappears - and what is really important here is I have no clue what domready really means!? :-D - I just read on the forums that multiple instances of the call cause the "object not found" error in i.e. explorer so I thought I'd give this a shot and it works like a charm. On top of that, Peter is a very smart guy with an eye for design that has given me some excellent feedback on my sites. Thank you Peter!
Harmony

I just finished my first Joomla! site (joomla 1.5.9) and used this extension to meet the clients desire for a newsletter. The extension was very easy to use and made me look like a pro! I didn't need the plus or pro license so I asked the guys for an email link and sent them a $20.00 donation anyway! Thanks for offering such wonderful "free" software. I will donate each time I install it for a client.