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troykristoffer
- 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.
Thanks for your feedback.
JFusion has a lot of options and can be a bit overwhelming if you are new to integrations. However, if we would remove the extra features (that you find confusing), we would have hundreds of people complaining that they need that function x,y or z. There are a lot of features of jfusion that help users like yourself with the setup. Such as the wizard function, that only asks for the path to software and will pull more than 10 different database and url settings automatically. Also the redirection mod that you used works with the click of a button, rather than asking you to read through 5 pages of instructions and spend hours editing multiple files.
It seems that your major issue is with the documentation and that you had to figure some things out for yourself. Our documentation is a wiki site that everybody can contribute to. Rather than complaining about some missing information, why don't you spend 10 minutes adding in some text that will help other users that are new to JFusion. JFusion is a free community project and will grow faster if you make contributions (even if it is so simple as writing some text on our wiki).
Removing your redirection mod is extremely easy, just click on "disable redirection mod". Or if you have completely removed jfusion already, just remove the clearly marked redirection code at the start of your software index or configuration file. JFusion does not use any hacks.
We will release a revolutionary new JFusion 2.0.0 framework soon that will have an easier interface and are therefore waiting with making new video tutorial for the new framework release (otherwise we would be duplicating our efforts)
I had a few small formatting problems, such as phantom width bugs re-arranging Joomla's columns and the sites global list bullets being used as spacers which looked terrible, but I was able to edit the template for that easily.
The column issue was fixed by upgrading to the latest version, as advised by JXtended's knowledgeable customer support.
This component also includes a replacement for the rating system as well as a VERY HUGE selection of social bookmarking icons. I appreciated both features.
The features are robust: This is almost just like Facebook, but built from the ground up. All the major components are here, including friends, photo galleries, applications and more, but where this extension has great features, it lacks in functionality and ease of use.
I realize this is a beta product, however, there are so many problems with this release that I would advise AGAINST installing it on any site of importance.
The back end is mostly useless, confusing and most of the setting labels are almost impossible to read because they're in code. On top of that, most of the absolute necessary settings and features are completely absent from the admin back end. (Like being able to disable the "Display Birthdate" field being a requirement. Currently the birthday is forced to show.)
Trying to decipher the CSS and customize the style of everything will take you many many hours and cause lots of frustration and confusion. This is because that some style elements are controlled by CSS, and others are hard coded in lots of template files that are scattered deeply in folders that are sometimes many levels deep. Other style elements seem to be completely phantom, as myself and colleagues have been unable to find their source after hours of searching.
Hopefully problems like all users having to dig in their settings and manually enable required applications like the friendship application
before they can have friends, and the fact that no notification is received when new friends request a connection will be fixed along the way out of beta.
Also, it will take my weeks to track down and fix all of the grammar, spelling and capitalization mistakes in the error/confirmation messages and throughout the templates.
Still, this extension shows great promise and will be a required installation on all of my sites from now on. I just hope that I won't grow old just trying to customize and clean it up.