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The mistake I made....I had gone through only the first review and was frightened because I am not an expert in these things and have no idea about any scripting language. I had tried all the other menu systems, but found one problem or the other. Finally, I decided to give this a trial too. And God! I was astonished with the simplicity, the extensive formatting capabilities and ease of instructions provided.
I can't understand the people who claim to be experts in Programming languages and haven't been able to configure this. No offence meant! But, believe me, I am new to this and do not know any other programming or scripting language. But, this was the easiest and the best I found around.
The instructions provided were the best which I haven't observed in any other components or modules. IF anyone find this difficult to use, I advise them to stay away from Joomla altogether.
The only thing I felt bad about was that I had taken the words of a few negative reviews instead of reading all the reviews and had wasted a lot of time trying out the other modules/components.
Believe me, this had been very easy to configure and I was able to tweak it to the exact look I needed. Go ahead and try this out, folks.
Thanks to the Developers for providing this for Free! So, some of the best things do come for Free!
Thank you.

I pratically tried every menu manager in these section: there is no match. SwMenuFree is absolutely the best.
The backend section is fantastic and let you to create whatever menu you have in mind. It's a pity it is not a part of joomla by default.
Regarding the documentation issue, I wonder if documentation was necessary .... very easy to use ... I think the manual is even overdone.

After installing and being underwhelmed with jscookmenu (it worked, but not what I was looking for), I installed this menu. First, I have to say WOW! What documentation! The module (that actually displays the menu) is installed as part of an admin component that is the most feature-rich free extension I've ever seen. Not only does each page have very nice illustrated help, there's a 30+ page PDF manual that you can download as well. Just tell it what you want the menu to look like (they've even got a color-chart picker!) and tell it to publish it. Voila! I was looking at it for a second Joomla! site of mine, and was so impressed that I put it in production on my main site (www.backupcentral.com). NO Javascript, DHTML. And the menus look really nice!

This extension is a prime example of how to make money with open-source software. This version is free, and it's awesome. Then he offers an even fancier version with even fancier-looking menus for $50. For what I'm going to do, though, I'm going to stick with the free one.

I do have one minor complaint. If you enable the cache option, there's a bug in the code that the author is aware of and has a fix for. See this web page: http://www.swmenupro.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=302&topic=4670.0
But he said he'd fix that in the core code back in April, and it's now July. It's a one character fix. Either turn off caching or add a digit in the code; it's up to you.

For a newcomer to Joomla but an experienced C++ developer I found the supplied documentation inadequate, more a list of features with no explanation on how you use the software. I would like to see a step by step set of instructions that show how you use the component to create a simple menu system, preferably with diagrams that show the finished menus. The support sites http://www.swonline.biz/ is currently inaccessible and the hosting of the forums at http://www.swmenupro.com also seem unrelaible - sometimes the site loads, sometimes not but in any event it looks as though the forums are quite slow and inactive - maybe one person is trying to support too many users. From my own experience, regardless of how good the component may be, a newcomer may not find the documentation and forum support to be adequate.

This is a great component. Very easy to setup and configure. The preview allows you to very quickly develop a professional menu which is reliable. I used the free version for ages on our site which is great but moved to the pro edition recently the pro edition has many more features and is well worth the money. If you need a menu system which does it all look at this.

This is the best free menu-extension that I've tried, and I've tried them all. Very easy to administer and customize. I've had a few minor issues but despite this I want to give the highest grades possible. The support from the forum/developer is very fast, helpful and professional! :-D

Wow - was that simple. I didn't even have to read the instructions and made a slideout menu right off. Let me get this straight though. Even though it's intuitive, SW comes with really extensive illustrated instructions. OTOH, most of the components I see are horribly complex and nonintuitive, so of course they come with little or no instructions, or garbled ones. It's all butt-backwards ;')

I guess we should have the swmenufree folks do instructions for some of the other components.

I have used transmenu in the past and it had conflicts with some of my templates and even though I know how to fix this now I still like SWmenuFree. It can be customized in so many different ways and it has transmenu in it. So if you like transmenu you will love this menu system.

l'd been searching and searching for a simple way to design and update my menus that need to communicate with virtuemart. This is the only extension l've found capable of doing it oh so easily without any need for hard coding. five stars just for thinking of this option.

A professional website with a demo of the Pro version tempted me to download the free version and I was amazed.

This tool is a fantastic addition to a developers arsenal to get a drop-down menu system working very quickly. Excellent customisation options. I did not even download the documentation.

I already use Extended Menu which works fine but using this tool is so much easier.

Don't forget to download the SwMenuMaker tool as well which takes the pain out of moving menu items around.

Well done!

I tried another menu system but no luck due to poor documentation.

SWmenuFree comes with comprehensive 23 page user manual and after 2 hours I got it working.

Looks great and feels good.

I always try components and modules offline in XP, prior to putting them on a linux site. This function was easy to use offline and it installed online just as well. It is great to put on simple colours or complex photo graphics into the menu. I cut some pieces from a photo, saved them as a png file and simply uploaded and added these to the menu. I was using an extended menu and replaced it with this one with ease. If anything there are too many options but the program is reasonably intuitive. Menus can easily be placed across the page, down the page, left submenus, right submenus in all kinds of colors and formats and even the submenus transparency can be adjusted. Borders can be added, removed or chosen as different colours. I didn't need the manual, just hacked it around offline and when happy used the same parameters online. Altogether a fine piece of software. It was a bit scary when the program came up with some horrid looking message and I thought everything would crash but this disappeared almost immediately and it has worked fine. No issues, but I keep expecting them because it has worked that well and there are so many options that I haven't tried them all yet.
Good Job

I have been trying many of the GNU GPL menu modules and components over the past several hours and SWmenuFree was the winner for me. I was able to create a dropdown trans menu that exactly matched my website in a matter of 10 minutes. Thanks for an excellent menu tool!

however it messed up with my Greek encoding... :-(
I can use this

I have used SwMenu for a while now and I must say it is the best menu system out there. I have tried a lot of them. This component makes it possibe to create exactly the menu you want and most of the menu systems inluded in this component makes the links searchable for the search engines - which is very important to me.

As important as a good product is good support. And the developer is always very helpful and quick. After switching template I got problems with my menus. This was not a problem of this component but a template problem. Never the less the developer rewrote my template to it work. What about that service? I am used to developers of templates and components putting the resposibility on the other part.

Excellent component.

Simple to use - you'll be up and running in 15 minutes.
Supports background images.
Great control console.
Great CSS support.
Excellent support forums.

This is by FAR the best free menu extension I have used. In fact, it is one of the best of any kind of extension I have used for Joomla!

Awesome menu system for someone like me who is just above being css illiterate, but does want some customization! I tried a few of the other menu systems, and settled on this one. I got things working last night much easier than I could have imagined, and am ecstatic over the results. I wanted to be able to use the menu buttons that I'm already using in the Solarflare II template. This menu system made this super easy

This did require a tiny bit of knowledge of an image editing program (Paint Shop Pro in my case), but only because of how Solar Flare template has the button images done. The button image and mouseover images in Solar Flare II are a single png image file (top half has one button, the bottom half of the image has the mouseover button). I just needed to cut each half of the image file and paste each as its own image, and then upload those two files to my server.

The component then creates a module for you, and you go in and fill in the parameters. All I had to do was, in the proper box in the form, point to the new image files I uploaded. I had to do some tweaks like change the font size, etc., but all this is done in the component without requiring any knowledge of css.

Great menu system, and exactly what I was looking for.

This is my first review. But now I had to write one.

I am teaching students at a university how to use Joomla and after looking at several free menusystems I tried this one and it worked immediately. Impressively simple to set up if you already know your way around Joomla.

Congratulations on a well done system. My students will be happy with this one. I wish all extentions for Joomla was as well done as this one.

This is a great module. Easy to configure and very powerful.

There does seem to be a layout glitch in the way sub-menus are displayed in IE 7 browsers, but looks to be addressed in future versions as discussed here:

http://www.swonline.biz/index.php?option=com_simpleboard&Itemid=59&func=view&catid=29&id=3799

I really like this menu, but it just wont work in Safari, not that that'll bother too many people!
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