The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

Hi - very glad that this has been useful for you, and thanks for the review. If you're into advanced PHP and/or template work then it's possible to get around the way that the MetaMod is still published but with nothing in it.
If it's just a matter of an empty MetaMod showing up with some CSS styling around it, then that's generally not too hard to get around, especially from MetaMod version 1.5g. Just give the MetaMod an arbitrary css class suffix to prevent Joomla from styling the MetaMod itself, then work with the "style for included modules" and/or the "Style override for included modules" to make sure the inner included modules get styled correctly.
I'm working on MetaModPro which will completely avoid these issues and give even more control over module layout across the whole of Joomla, but because of the amount of ongoing work involved it's likely to be commercial. Watch this space!

Hi Beededea, thanks for the review. There are just a few points I'd like to pick up on:
1 - yes, there's a patch you can make to a core Joomla script to make a list of modules and their IDs show up when you are editing the module, but it's not compulsory. And, it's only for the Joomla 1.0.x version of MetaMod -- the Joomla 1.5 version doesn't need it.
2 - yes, the ability to do some simple scripting is a bonus. There are some simple operations you can do without any scripting at all (GeoIP country selection and time/date limits on module display). There's also an increasing number of PHP recipes on the home page that need only minimal customisation in order to use them. When I get an enquiry from someone about how to do a particular task I usually add a new recipe to the list.
3 - module space when the target module isn't showing... sigh... this certainly can be a pain. Sometimes this happens, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the template. Thankfully there are a number of ways to tackle this, but it often depends on the template and CSS that you are using. One quick thing to try if this is happening to you is to add a "module suffix" to the MetaMod instance you are working on. Often, a random suffix added here fools the CSS into not allocating extra space for the missing module. This can also sometimes help if the included module isn't getting its CSS styling right - work with the module suffix for MetaMod, the module suffix for the included module, and the "style for included modules" in MetaMod to find a combination that works.
Sometimes though, if your template makes design decisions about whether to make space for a module position depending on whether there are any active modules in that position, MetaMod fools it into making space, when it really shouldn't (cos MetaMod will later decide not to put anything in there). In that case you need to do some work on the template. As a last resort, of course, you can always get MetaMod to put in an alternative module if it decides not to include anything else -- e.g. a nice graphic, google adwords, a link (advert) to some other page on your site, etc. Be creative! Often we forget that not everything on the site needs to be utilitarian...
beededea, if you e-mail me I'll see if it's possible to get around your spacing issues.
-- Stephen