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I can't say enough good stuff about this extension. It's so well designed its surprising. I've purchased lots of commercial extensions and not one of them has been so trouble-free and easy to configure as this one.

Also, I did run into a couple of minor difficulties, but Alex on the support forums was EXTREMELY fast at responding and was very helpful.

THIS is how you produce and support a commercial extension!

This plugin supposedly has everything I want, but I can't get the comments part of it to function at all.

Most all support history on the developer's website is in Spanish, and while you can post a comment with a question to the developer, I haven't received a response, but have noticed others are having the same problem.

The documentation is lacking as well.

Overall I would give this plugin a 5 stars if it worked properly.

Virtuemart very well be one of the most robust and complete shopping cart for Joomla, which also makes it one of the most popular with add-on makers... It truly has an amazing library of add on's available.

Unfortunately a complete lack of direction and leadership of the project has crippled it into an extremely complicated, buggy and hard-to-use extension.

It's plethora of features are terribly organized and difficult to gain control over.

I've installed and configured Virtuemart for nearly 2 years now on 10+ websites, and I am still today pulling my hair out trying to get it to do what it should. There are a great many instances of templating headaches and bugs, which make using Virtuemart bittersweet. There certainly is no better FULL solution for eCommerce, but these problems must be tolerated to use it.

One great example of this is tax calculation. On my most of the stores I've configured, I need to disable taxes calculation altogether. There are no less than 4 places in the configuration that pertain to taxes, and only ONE of them is under the "TAX" settings. Virtuemart comes setup to automatically calculate 9% tax on every product. Turning that off is a nightmare if you don't know what you're doing. There's a setting on each product listing, that says "Which tax rate do you want to use." If you set that to "NONE" it still calculates tax anyway. Completely disabling taxes in the Global Configuration page does not stop Virtuemart from adding tax to your products either. At this point, I went right into the TAX rate settings and completely DELETED all tax rate profiles so that Virtuemart had NO Tax rate data to refer to. This ALSO does not prevent tax calculation. All of my products were still displaying taxed prices. Finally after poking around in the user group settings for other reasons, I stumbled across a checkbox under user groups that says "Display taxed prices for this group." I unchecked it and Viola! The prices for my products are now untaxed. This is just one example of the many problems I faced during my many experiences using Virtuemart

Configuring settings should not be this difficult.

Couple that with the fact that Virtuemart is completely unsupported (because it's free.) this is an extension that is a nightmare even for seasoned Joomla operators.

There are support forums, but they are completely ignored by any official staff, and for every problem you need a solution for you'll find 500 unanswered questions posted if you search the forum, and if you're lucky, 1 in that 500 will be answered by another user.

Overall, Virtuemart will get the job done extremely well, if you hold it's hand the entire way. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for someone to come along and make it obsolete.

This is easy to install, easy to configure, and does exactly what I want!

Love it!

This extension is a must install component on all of my sites.

I'm very impressed by how stable and how polished it is, and it's not even v1.0 yet! There is quite a bit of common-sense in this product, but it's still simple, and easy to understand and configure.

At the time of this review, the website for the component was there, had clear, English documentation, and a working forum which was active.

The only thing I was initially confused about is that the while the component is both a helpdesk support ticket system and a FAQ Knowledgebase component, it wasn't quickly clear that a support ticket *IS* a knowledgebase article, and can be inserted into the KB by checking a box when updating a ticket. I was looking for a more separate KB input system, but this is nice when you realize how it works. If you want to add a KB item that isn't the result of a user support request, you just add a ticket yourself.

While this is a well rounded and polished component, I did only give it 4 stars, because it's missing a couple of small basic features that must be include before it hits v1.0 in my opinion:

They need to add a way to delete tickets, or hide them from the public when they have been added to the KB. Currently I cannot find any ability to hide or delete existing KB articles.

Also, the component needs to move to displaying the "real name" field rather than the "username" field for security and customization purposes. While you can hide the "Entered By (Author)" field from user's in the ticket information section, unfortunately the notes field always displays the author's username.(There is the option of hiding notes from the user, but it's often a missed checkbox and notes can't be retroactively hidden... and besides, there are cases where I'd want the user to see the notes.)

Overall, these issues are very small, and overlookable for now. The product is still in beta after all. I would highly recommend this component over any other right now for your helpdesk needs.

I love this component! It's exactly what I've been looking for.

Some of the features I love that I was surprised to find in a free extension:

- View & and reply to any messages right from the back end of your joomla site, without even using an email system! THIS is a big deal for me! You don't even need to specify an email address that receives mail to get or respond to a customer's message. (However, when a customer responds to your response, I'm not sure how that's handled.)
- Built in customizable captcha - You can specify number of letters, random or words, colors and more. You can also use third party captcha.
- Advanced field editor and customization - you can add any kind of field you want, and customize it down to the detail.
- Unlimited number of contact forms and purposes. You can create as many contact forms that send messages anywhere you want, and use any number of custom fields in them.
- Built in email template and css editors. You can customize the Form CSS and Email Template that your email arrives in, right from the form creation page.
- Display your form by page (menu item) or in a module.
- Accept email attachements via the form
- Detailed, easy to understand tooltips and instructions. This was nice, because there's so many other extensions out there missing tooltips or with poorly written tooltips.

In a nutshell, this extension allows you to create any kind of form you want, and specify every detail, or specify NOT to use any detail. It's amazingly robust and complete.

Kudos!
-Troy

It functions fine, but is very ugly and cannot be made to look better.

Most of it's ugliness comes from the relentless advertising of the developer's website, and no way to remove them.

Might as well pay for a commercial extension that looks polished and professional.

I run a Virtuemart store, and have many of the same products with different colors etc.

For example: I sell scented candles. Each candle comes in different scents, colors and sizes.

So, each candle will have a different description block for the scent, the color, and the size.

So... I can use this plugin to create a centralized description block for each attribute, and not have to change each product when something changes.

For example. A white vanilla large candle will have 3 different sections of it's description.
Scent Description
Color Description
& Jar description

A small white vanilla candle would share the same scent and color description but have a different jar description.

Using this plugin, I can define different "tags" to display each attribute's description. Then if I need to change the description of, say the vanilla scent, I can change the definition in the plugin and will update across ALL the products that have that description and I don't have to go into tall the vanilla candle product listings and change it manually.

GENIUS PLUGIN!

I like the look of this extension from it's screen shots and listed features.

Unfortunately, because most of my customers do not create accounts on my site, I couldn't use this extension, because it does not allow unregistered users to submit tickets.

Setting the "All User Access" to yes, only opens the system up to registered users. Registered users should be allowed to submit tickets by default, and Admins allowed to open the system up to unregistered.

If this feature is ever enabled, I will revisit this system, as it seems pretty robust.

I am not an amateur Joomla user. I've used it for years and have lots of experience using extensions.

I could not figure out how to get this to work. It seems that there are many different pieces you must install, and not all of them are available for download.

After I installed what I could find/figure out, I lost all access to editing articles in my back end.

Luckily I tried this on a sandbox site first.

It would not be so bad if there was proper documentation and instructions, of which there are absolutely none, and the native language of the authors is not English. They should install an English language pack on their website so we can figure this out!

This does what I want!
It's easy to use

My only hope is that in the future it will support Joomla Wrappers.

For example: My Joomla Menu item for my forum loads my forums within the site's wrapper.

Unfortunately, when a user clicks on a link inside this module, it opens the forums without a wrapper. But this is a small problem, and the module works very well otherwise!

Good work!

Pros:
- Supports lots of software, supposedly simultaneously
- The extension has the appearance of a slick, easy to use interface.
- Has the potential to be the best bridge software out there
- External software, like forums and galleries appear in a joomla wrapper, actually integrating it into your joomla template, and making it appear more a part of your site than a separate product, and reducing the CSS customization needed for the software.

Cons:
- Trying to get it configured properly is confusing even for seasoned webmasters
- Even after following all the steps exactly, logins do not work properly.
- Most tooltips are poorly written, and often hard to understand
- Help documentation is incomplete, often containing things like "Link goes here" or "Needs more info on this topic"
- Even after uninstalling the extension my site is broken and I cannot access my forums. Joomla automatically redirects to a page that says that the JFusion plugin is improperly configured. Even typing in the direct url to my forums, it still redirects back to this joomla page. There should be no risk of such problems. Uninstalling the extensions and plugins should automatically revert all changes to the original site.
- The risk is high to completely ruin a site and it's user tables.

Other Thoughts:
My main issue with this extension is that it is very difficult to configure (relatively) and the self service help documentation is incomplete and unhelpful. A confusing interface/system is more tolerable when you have the proper help, but unfortunately the documentation for this product doesn't help hardly at all.