The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

1. Custom Properties is avialable for Joomla 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5.x too. Don't know, why it's not show here.
2. Custom Properties allows you to build so powerful search engine - you find nothing competitive in the whole JED, not for free, neither for money.
3. The user experience of Custom Properties is so positive, that if you use it once, you will forced by your users to use it forever.

And now go and try to find something other. I'm sure, you will come back.

I use CP since 3 years: the one and only place of lack is the layout of search module. But for someone with layouting knowledge there are not more than 2 hours to adapt the layout to the own site.

First off, I really like the demo backend and frontend site for testing. This has a lot of capabilities that I'm not even looking for - but the "one" I am looking for is not functioning in the demo site.
I've been looking for a search module that can be set to search specified sections and not others, since one of the sections of our website has information that we don't want to be public (but for technical reasons that would take too long to explain, the articles must be categorized as "public" just not searchable). The built in joomla module can't do this. CP's search module can, supposedly, but in the configuration area where you enter the sections you want searched "Bind Section" when I hit save, it deletes the text I entered and does not save what I entered. I entered "Food,Wine" which are section labels that already exist on the demo site. You can also enter "bind sections" for searching in the Module level, but it doesn't override the general configuration settings, so it doesn't do you any good.
Maybe this would work on another site, but it doesn't in the demo.

I had a minor customization that I wanted to do to the free version of this extension and a few questions as I was getting it to fit well with my site's look and feel. My questions were answered every time in less than 24 hours and the developer is very friendly and helpful. This is a very powerful plugin and I would recommend it to anyone.

I just signed up to write this comment. This component is extremely handy and works perfect. But, the people that are behind this, really are professionals and friendly. Answered immediately to my questions and solved each one of them.

Highly recommended it for everyone !

I cannot get by without Custom Properties -- inevitably there is always an application within each site which simply needs it.
Most recently on a Joomla 1.7 site (yes, there is a version for 1.6/1.7, go to the website, hopefully they'll update here soon), I used Custom Properties to tag some contacts. It does both the base contacts included with Joomla, as well as the very flexible Contacts Enhanced component.
It really makes life easy and the properties and values you assign to each article, contact and other components (it works with several other components), are truly great
Great work, must-have!

can i have horizontal fields to the cp search module if yes how can i do this?
many thanks

If you install this extension then you will risk your site. I installed it and was not working as expected and I uninstalled it. After that my home page was loading with a backlink to the author website and all pages where shown with error messages and backlinks.
You are warned.

It's really useful extension.
My suggestion is to get inspired by other similar extensions to complete this wonderful extension.

best wishes for you and Solidsystem team! ;)

This is a realy great Extension. Realy!

But one of the most important thing if you build websites for customers is the availability of updates for new version.

Since 8 month is joomla 1.6/1.7 stable available. I have 24 websites where i'm using this extension.
Now i can't migrate this sites from J 1.5 to 1.7 if my customers want to keeping this functionality.

Please don't understand me wrong. I know, it's absolutly free and you have to spend a lot of your time.
But this is precisely the reason why open source software in the business sector still has a bad reputation.

Now i have to say good bye to "Custom Properties". After the migration we will implement "Seblod - CCK" for this functionality.

It is great no doubt but I faced a problem that tags editing didnt appear with the list view of multicategories component, it appears with joomla standard list view and also with fjrelated views but when using multicategories it disappear, please if there is any solution will be great, and I didnt see any forum or help docs.

It is a stable product that the developer keeps an eye on and did reply to my question within a few hours. The functionality is perfect for the site I'm developing.
I did have one issue that I resolved, the cloud tag module was not working. Solution was to uninstall and re-install the standalone version from developers website.

Great work, folks. A functional component, a customizable module; perfect and beautiful. Very simple to use. Results pages fairly good too!

I've been waiting Joomla 1.6 for publishing a single article in different categories.
I hope that joomla developpers will add this feature in joomla 1.6 core as soon as possible, it's a shame it lacks it...

I was really disappointed but after I found this component, and it does the trick. I just want to thank you, men... 5stars for you and only 2 for joomla 1.6...

This is a greate extension, when using in conjunction with its plugin for adding a wysiwyg cp tags button to the WYSIWYG editor.

However I only gave it 4/5 because I can't seem to get the button to work for Virtuemart Products WYSIWYG editor. Which if I could, would be AMAZING.

I do not like the interface for adding tags to articles. To me, it is not straight forward. Also when I went to uninstall, the plugins were not automatically disable causing a error on the page. Luckily I found an old forum post telling me to disable the plugins. I wish these instructions were in the uninstall instructions on the site.

well, it is working exactly as described in intro ... easy to install (there were error messages, but a note about them also, that they have to be ignored ...)

working perfect, but it is missing one very importatn thing ... i think ...

beside the phocagallery content element there could be also one for Joomgallery - one of most used galleries anyway ... i use it and installing this component i hoped to have possibility to add and publish tags on images in tagcloud ...

i appreciate particullary the CP Tags button, thats a real help in editing ...

i will come back to the product home-page regullary to check out if there is the joomgallery content element added ...

Thanks for Your work guys

Thanks for great extension. Use it several years on my site - it's almost perfect.

I had been looking for an extension like that for a while and finally I found it!!!

I used "Custom properties" for my association for stray cat protection. Now users willing to adopt one of our shelter's cat, can search for it by color, hair and sex :-).

Easy to install and configure, simple to use.
It took me not more than an hour to install it, create the 5 properties I needed and assign them to my articles.

What I didn't manage to do, I don't know whether because of a lack of knowledge on my side or because it is not supported by design:
- assign a default value to a check-box type property. How to have the check-box already selected?
- have a property value that means "all (the articles)". Now if you don't set any property, no article is found.

Grazie!!!
Silvia

I really wished I could use this extension but sadly I cannot :(

It's not working with languages other than English ... I don't know how components are written these days without supporting UTF-8!

I am really disappointed.

This component gives you a sophisticated tool to provide an in-depth search function for your website.

The basic idea is that using "Custom Properties" you can assign tags as you like to each individual article. The component (with its plugins and modules) then allows you to provide the user with a multi-level search function in order to filter the articles by those tags. As ususal for search functions, a list of articles meeting the search requirements is then displayed.

This can be useful when you have a lot of articles, and your visitors want to see only a selection of them, with much more possibilities than only using Joomla's sections and categories.

The backside is that it works - by definition - only as long as the relevant articles are tagged appropriately. And this must be done manually anc carefully. Therefore, this component is best for websites which are looked after by something like a professional team, or at least a very dedicated admin or editor.

Concerning instalation: Several users have experienced problems making Custom Properties work. They report an alert "Component not configured: missing fields" where the Search-module should appear. The reason is: The search module appears correctly only when there is at least one "field" (or say: "search criterion" or "group of tags") defined. You do this in CP's "Manage fields" area. And the field must be set to "published". Otherwise you get he error message instead of the module.

You also should carefully read the installation instructions provided on the author's website. There you find many important or helpful details. This compensates, to some extent, for the missing "help" texts in the component.

I am giving it a "good" instead of "excellent" because of the missing help and, reportedly, some problems with support.