Many people have varied opinions on what makes a good or great addon for the popular content management system Joomla! however it’s often not what matters that comes first to mind when choosing your additional components, modules and plugins for Joomla! The first thing most people i know of look for is the license, now granted not everyone is able to pay for products and some just want complete pure open-source.

The recent move by the Joomla! team to enforce a GPL while retaining commercial applications makes perfect sense, depending if your one of those that doesnt mind paying the odd dollar or one of those that is from the breed that open-source means 100% freedom. Oddly enough open-source does not imply free it in it’s purest form simply means you can take the code, re-distribute it, modify it, alter it, do pretty much what you want with it under the provisions that you give credits to all authors – however this in itself varies depending on the license of choice.

No doubt someone will pop up with an idealistic approach and debate the concept of open-source, perhaps even my words, but before you do.. i think you should take into account that the likes of the GPL are sadly open to interpretation – it’s not rock solid despite common belief!

As an end user which is mostly the people i try to speak to with my posts, when seeking our a product the first thing you need to know is commercial or not what license is it under, does it truly suit you to have a closed source product, even an encrypted product – I recall once reading on a Redhat 8 install a quote along the lines of “you wouldn’t buy a car with the bonnet welded shut would you ?” the same applies to your additions to your site.. aim for a good license that suits your needs!

After the deciding if you want commercial or not, open source or not then you really before getting into the product should wander over the distributors site and review their support platform. Ticket systems often imply a small userbase or a small developer base. This is normally done to keep everything simple – the downside to this is clearly that a single developer working on both support and development cannot manage both in a prompt manner.

The other downside is also the lack of community discussion, most distributors use forums rather than ticket systems as the likes of the community can get involved, users can help one another with simple things and overall the process is a touch smoother and the developer can spend more time developing and less time supporting.

However if your looking over a commercial product that offers forums, check if they have moderators! Check the response rate, how many posts have big fat zeros in the response column ?

The main VirtueMart forum for example has 4 zero responded to support requests out of 80 in it’s main support forum, an impressive figure the two competing products Jomdoc for example has 23/80 zero responses, not an overly wonderful response rate while DOCman has 0/80 unresponded to posts a super impressive figure (this only takes the new 1.5 forums into account by the way) The Joomla! forums also support a very impressive support rate with almost 95% of all posts responded to and 80% of those with a valid response that fixes the users issue (1.5 forums only)

Like it or not all products will encounter issues, will need further work to function how you want and maintain a compatibility with the latest framework they run upon so support is as vital to us end users as the product itself…. paying for the addon or not

  1. Check the requirements
  2. Check the license
  3. Check the support
  4. Try the demo

and at all times remember that local wamps, mamps and lamps often have all the features you will ever need that you may not have on cheaper co-located servers, so .. check sometimes its worth the effort to run a test site on your remote server too!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 2%