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Successful Extension Potluck, JUG Bay Area, California, USA

Successful Extension Potluck, JUG Bay Area, California, USA

The Holiday Joomla! Extension Potluck was held December 5, 2012 at the NextSpace Union Square in San Francisco. An Extension Potluck is something we made up last year where at the end of the year, we meet together and bring a food dish to share with each other and each member shares a "mini-presentation" about a specific extension they enjoy using. 12 members were in attendance which was perfect from a time perspective - only a couple did not share.

The NextSpace location was great! It was a rainy evening and kept some indoors - so it was great to be with those who ventured out to hear about extensions they may not have otherwise heard about. The criteria for this meetup was to not show extensions in 1.5. 2.5 or 3.x only. Thus, there is no reference to whether an extension is 1.5 or not.

Here's what was shared (aside from super yummy food):

Allen Siewert - Booking Calendar for Joomla!

Member: Allen Siewert

Extension: Booking Calendar for Joomla

Cost: $25.00 USD (unlimited domains)

Joomla: 2.5 & 3.x

The site he used this on was for a client that has a couple of rental properties on Maui with a need to publish the dates the rental was available or booked and the season (like peak season, high season, low season). The payments are all handled offline. Yet, the client is easily able to block off the dates.

Ric Ewing - ExtendedReg

Member: Ric Ewing

Extension: ExtendedReg

Cost: Starts at $35.00 USD

Joomla: 2.5 & 3.x

ExtendedReg gives the ability to add custom fields to the registration process....and that's not all. He showed a site where it's used and when someone registers, they go into a hold mode until they are approved by an admin to become registered. The admin can login from the front, see the notification in a module saying how many are awaiting approval, and then simply click a "thumbs up" icon to approve the user. Too cool. The component styles nicely out of the box and has an interesting interface that lists the custom fields and then gives you options as to the number of columns they display in. He didn't have to do any css to get the form looking very nice. This was how he was using it. There are other ways to use it too so that a user wouldn't have to be approved manually, etc. Worth checking out!! This is a commercial component and cost starts at $35.00 USD. There are add-ons to extend functionality of the basic and integrate it with other components like JomSocial, VirtueMart and RSmembership.

Renea Leathers - Advanced Module Manager

Member: Renea Leathers

Extension: Advanced Module Manager

Cost: Non-commercial and Commercial for 50 Euros

Joomla: 2.5 & 3.x

Renea recently moved to the Bay Area joined the JUG and she has this darling southern accent that is just adorable! Renea shared Advanced Module Manager and showed it in that RocketTheme admin interface that they have. Advanced Module Manager, she explained, helps you to publish modules to specific areas of the site in an easier way (or different way) than the Joomla! core module manager. One accesses the advanced module manager the same way as the core module manager - through the module manager. Once in the module information though, a number of new options are introduced as to where the module is published. One can choose particular pages, components, can mirror a module, can publish specific days, weeks or months, can force a module to publish only to certain user groups or languages or templates and even to one (or more) specific url's. Apparently Module Anywhere takes Advanced Module Manager to an even deeper level. One thing Renea mentioned is that it's easy to kinda forget what you did - or like that it can get confusing real quick. So take your time and get to know it. Advanced Module Manager has a non-commercial version or a commercial version for 50 Euros. Renea definitely recommends the commercial version although the non-commercial is good too.

Emmanuel Lemor - HikaShop

Member: Emmanuel Lemor

Extension: HikaShop

Cost: Non-commercial and Commercial 49,95 & 99,90 Euros

Joomla: 2.5 & 3.x

Emmanuel shared HikaShop with the group. HikaShop does have a non-commercial version called Starter and then commercial versions ranging from 49,90 to 99,90 Euros to give additional functionality. Emmanuel showed an example site of a company that does these juice cleanses and have super complicated shipping requirements due to the fact that it's juice. HikaShop gives a lot of flexibility in how the shipping works. It also handles all the ACL activities so that only certain pricing shows to certain groups which is nice if one wants to have different pricing for wholesale, distributor, etc. HikaShop also has an API so really, if a developer wanted to, they could make it do anything. Of course, ecommerce is something that could be discussed for days and Emmanuel did great giving us a brief overview in the allotted 10-15 minutes.

Andrea Dace - Botheme Content Slider and K2 Slider

Member: Andrea Dace

Extensions: BT Content Showcase and K2 Slider

Cost: BT is $20.00 USD and K2 is non-commercial

Joomla: BT is 2.5 & 3.x and K2 is 2.5

Andrea shared Bowthemes Content Slider and K2 Slider. Andrea is building her own site and has figured out much with Joomla pretty much through trial and error. She is building a site that will offer classes using Moodle and is integrating an online magazine into the site. That's where the sliders came in so that it could look nice. I loved Andrea's presentation because it takes a lot of courage to get up in front of people to talk about things that you're just kinda playing with and are unsure about so many things because you're just learning. It's easy to forget that somewhere along the line, someone has to learn that there's joomla and then there's maybe a template framework and then a template on top of that and then content and extensions that also pile on. Andrea is doing very well learning Joomla and putting together her own site. This is what makes User Groups powerful. She can get support and feedback on what she's doing and do it herself. Just excellent! I'm really proud of her.

Steve Wyant - JFBAlbum

Member: Steve Wyant

Extension: JFBAlbum

Cost: $20 USD

Joomla: 2.5

Steve shared JFBAlbum which is super cool and what I was going to share as well except he did it and he did awesome with it. What JFBAlbum does is pull images that have been uploaded to albums in Facebook through your Joomla site. Steve shared that there isn't an API required from Facebook for it to work. One simply inserts portions of the url of the album on facebook to get image thumbnails to appear in a module or thumbnails of albums as a menu item which then are clicked and the individual thumbnails of the images in the album are displayed through Joomla. There are also slider modules for this component in which you can dictate which albums NOT to include. All can be seen and tested on their demo site for the extension so you totally can try before you buy. JFBAlbum is a commercial component and module. The support and updates are very prompt from the developer. Great way to have clients upload images to facebook albums (which they may do already anyways) and facebook can resize and store the 4000px wide images and you can just pull the images through Joomla.

Linda Jimerson - JoomPortfolio

Member: Linda Jimerson

Extension: JoomPortfolio

Cost: $69 USD per domain

Joomla: 2.5

Linda shared JoomPortfolio which she used on her own website to show a portfolio of websites she has built for clients. JoomPortfolio has the ability to add muliple categories and products. There are custom fields that can be set up so that you can display the information desired in a quick view and then once clicked, takes you to a longer description. JoomPortfolio has rating capabilities as well. Linda showed us a bit how things worked in the backend setup. Though, sadly, at this point, we were out of time so it was pretty rushed. Darn.

Happy Holidays everyone! Hope to see you at next years Extension Potluck! Have a great year!!

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