The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

About 2 years ago I made a shopping site with Joomla 1.5 and VM 1.1.9. Although both systems were new to me, I could make a workable shopping site with a bit of elbow grease and a few compromises.

For my new web site I needed VM only for the display of products, without a shopping cart. I thought this would be an easy task and started with Joomla 2.x and the new VM 2.x. To wrap it up, it is a mess and after months of hard work I am close to giving up. What pulls me down are the numerous things that do not work and for which you cannot find a work-around. The system has become hard to understand and there is no useful documentation. Since I started with VM 2.x I have followed every update, hoping that the bugs would disappear. Not one has disappeared, but one more got in with 2.1.2. And after each update I the code with the "hacks" that I found in the forum and that remedied at least some of the bugs, has to worked in again. That is frustrating.

For my purposes the functionality to add products with good images is vital. This was not quite easy in VM 1.5 but still manageable. Now it has become a total mess. The image management does not store/display my product images with the sizes I want nor the names nor the storage location I want. It just does some wild things and to clean up the mess you have to spend hours with FTP.

The system has some good new features like defining your own product fields. The main problem are simply the bugs, and that apparently nobody tries to fix them in updates.

I acknowledge that this is free software, but it should work nevertheless. Sorry folks, but I cannot give this product a good rating anymore.

I downloaded the free test module. Although it seems easy to implement, I could not make it work. Got the message 'no image' where the videos were supposed to show up. After tinkering for half an hour I gave up. Sorry, but cannot give another rating than poor.

Works really like a charm. Download, install, check paramters. Was done in a few minutes. Big thanks to the developer.

A Captcha is a MUST in my view. With my new Joomla/Virtuemart site hardly known to anybody, I received spam pretty soon. Came in all via the CONTACT form.

This fish is an excellent and very powerful tool. Indeed, in my view there is no alternative if you want to have a professional, multi-language site. Also making it making it by hand as proposed in one of the reviews here is something I want to disencourage everybody. I have some experience with a large web site that I started 10 years ago with ASP. It is too complex and maintenance in several languages drives you crazy for a large site.

The Joomfish has only one small drawback. It is a bit tough in the beginning. The installtion went smooth. Then you want to take your first steps and go to the Joomla control panel, and you are confused.

My major problem was that whenever I had to select a language from the drop-down box, I never knew if I have to select my source or my target language. I think the developers could do a lot with little effort to ease these problems with a step-by-step tutorial. Also some tool tip information next to the language selection boxes would help, and maybe a better wording on the translation form by using such unambiguous words like 'source language' and 'target language'.

There is indeed a lot of documentation - text, videos and a forum. But it is a bit here and a bit there, but you do not get the whole picture. Therefore my main advice, first take half a day to read before you go into action.

A few more tips: Use Firefox. I got an "error on page" message when I used the 'Manage Translations' function with IE8. (this function is not really necessary in my view).

In my experience you need mainly the 'Translation' menu. That page is your main tool. And when your basic language is let's say English and you want to tranlate into German, then select "German" from the drop down box, and from the "contents elements" box select something easy to start with like your contact page. Then check how it works. Once you got the hang of it, it is a charm and big fun.

In spite of the little criticism I decided to give a full 'excellent' rating. It is an excellent tool, and guys let's not forget that we get this for free!

Great Tool! Was within 5 minutes on the home page and worked. Easy to download and understand. I was also astonished about the quality of the Google translation. Certainly an enrichment for any web site catering for an international audience. Thanks to the developer!

I wanted a simple and straightforward colorslide tool. Simple Picture Slideshow is precisely that. Straightforward, easy (was running in a few minutes), the images load fast, no delay on starting the slide show and the images, although larger than the display, are sharp. I am hundred percent content. Thanks for a great product!