Joomla Extension Reviews

Moovur

2009-09-14T07:52:48Z

Let's talk about my latest favorite Joomla extension Moovur. Moovur is an extension that applies Captcha (you know...the little code you have to enter to submit a form). What is great about Moovur is the settings and it's ability to be fluid. I'm not the most technical person out there to give the deets on Moovur so I will simply tell you how it had enhanced my site.

I recently decided to advertise my prices on my website. I'm still not certain this is the best way to sell my services, but I thought I would test the waters. To have the ability to sell my services via a shopping cart I must have a login form. You can see how important it is to collect a customers information in this example. I had never had a login form before because all of my information is free. When I launched the latest and greatest version of this site I began to get a lot of registrations. The odd thing was that they were obviously bogus. Random names, gobbledygook, plain old garbage. I received about 30 of these bogus registrations in the last 2 weeks. This was a bit annoying.

I logged into my Moovur stats today and found that they'd captured almost 3000 spam attempts to register on my site. All of the sudden the 30 that got through didn't seem so bad.

My site notifies me of every registration. You can see that deleting 3000 bogus registrations would be seriously irritating. I've got to give it to the Moovur guys for developing this great extension. It equals real time to me. Time I could be spending working on a clients website. Thanks Moovur!

Update: In the last 24 hours there have been an additional 3500 spam attempts and Moovur got all but one.

MTW Migrator

2008-10-12T19:30:46Z

Let me tell you how much I LOVE this component. I was hesitant to upgrade Montano Designs to Joomla! 1.5 because of the utter hassle I thought it would be to convert all of my content and links. Not so with MTW Migrator. It was a simple as creating a new installation of Joomla in a sub-folder, installing the component and running it. If you use Community Builder or VirtueMart you'll need to install those prior to running the tool. You'll also need to install any modules you have on your old site you want converted to the new site. I didn't use that option, but keep in mind that the module has to work in 1.5. Otherwise it won't do you any good to pull the information over. This tool doesn't install the old modules, it only tells Joomla where to put them.

A security side note: It is wise to uninstall any non-core components, templates and modules if you are not using them. Developers try to make them secure, but the bad folks out there are always trying to find a way to exploit websites.

Get it here!

JCal Pro Calendar

2008-04-22T12:04:11Z

This is one of my favorite components. There are so many types of websites that can benefit from a calendar on their website. JCal Pro/ JCal Client is a great solution. They've released a beta version that now allows you to have multiple calendars. Maybe your site is for your church and you have many departments with multiple events. You can now separate these out so they're less cluttered. If you add on a separate Access Control Level component you could even regulate who sees what on your calendar.

JCE

2008-04-11T13:25:24Z

One of my favorite WSYWIG editors is JCE. The first thing I do with a new Joomla installation is load in this editor.

I love the way you can upload images with JCE. I also like the DocMan plug-in for JCE. Linking to articles is also very easy because you get dropdown boxes to select either the specific article or the existing link to the destination.