For years I’ve heard about RSForm!Pro. Everyone said it was great and easy to use. But I kept using Chronoforms, the free form tool for Joomla. Chronoforms is pretty great, but it is not easy for my clients to use. Also, when you use Chronoforms Wizard to create forms with 50 or 100 fields, it becomes almost impossible to work with.

When a client asked me to build a form with over 60 fields, I decided to buy a copy of RSForm!Pro to build the form. It was very easy it was to build a large form. What’s more, I think it would be pretty easy for my clients to build complex forms too.

What Make RSForm!Pro Good

• Every type of field is easy to add
• Easy Captcha
• Drag and Drop fields to change order. This worked flawlessly.
• Easy to use Date Picker.
• Responsive form template.

If you are building forms on Joomla, I highly recommend RSForm!Pro. At $25, it’s a good deal. Available for Joomla 1.5, 2.5, and 3.0.

• Also see Review Chronoforms for Joomla

JCrawler sitemap generator for Joomla is a great extension; it’s free and it includes all your Joomla pages, even if they are not linked to a menu.

DocMan document management and download extension for Joomla is a powerful and easy to use tool for managing document and file downloads. I recently installed and configured it for a client and found it to be very easy to set up; a great relief since the client wanted many different groups with different access permissions.

HikaShop, the commercial shopping cart extension for Joomla just released version 1.6 and added some great new features.

I’ve been somewhat critical of HikaShop, but the developers at HikaShop are making it better all the time.

Starting with version 2.2.2 of the JCE Content Editor for Joomla, there is a new feature that automatically creates a link from a URL in your text. This can be a real pain if you often type example URLs that are fake. For example, when writing How To procedures, you might write a URL like http://mysite.com.

JCE Content Editor 2.2.2 +, the awesome editor for Joomla, added a new feature that can be a real pain: Auto URL Linking. Auto URL Linking automatically turns a url in your text into a link.

For example, if you type http://mysite.com, JCE editor automatically makes it a link.

This could be a nice feature if you always want to make URLs in your text into links. But there are a couple reasons not to make URLs links:

• For Search Engine Optimization purposes, you don’t want too many outgoing links.
• If you write “How To” procedures like I do, you often write example urls; eg, http://mysite.com.

The problem is that if you don’t notice the auto linking, you get links you don’t want, or, if you use example (fake) URLs in a procedure, Google will pick them up as broken links.

Here’s How to Turn Off Auto Linking in JCE Content Editor

1. From the Joomla Admin menu, select Components > JCE Editor > Editor Global Configuration.
2. In the Custom Configuration Variables field, enter the following two lines:

   autolink_url:false;
autolink_email:false


3. Click Save and Auto Linking is gone.

PaGo Commerce, a new shopping cart for Joomla, brought to you by Joomlashack and CorePHP, is not only NOT ready for prime time, it’s not ready for beta. The beta version released this week is little more than a proof of concept. There is nothing in it that indicates to me how good or bad this new shopping cart will be.

Zoo, from Yootheme.com, is an exciting new Content Construction Kit for Joomla. What is a Content Construction Kit? It’s a tool that allows you to create unique content types, such as a blog, a cookbook, a business directory, without any programming knowledge.

Once is a while, you find a Joomla extension that’s just amazing. WidgetKit by Yootheme is such an extension. If you need a dazzling, easy-to-use slide show, tabs, accordion, HTML5 backward compatible video player, twitter feed, or gallery, WidgetK it is it. And it works in WordPress too.

Joomla is a great CMS with thousands of great extensions, but there are no great shopping carts for Joomla. Virtuemart, the popular shopping cart for Joomla, is big, buggy, and free, and it’s one of the most confusing shopping carts to learn. However, I recently discovered HikaShop, a free and commercial shopping cart for Joomla, and gave it a try. The free version is almost useless but at least it gives you the chance to try before you buy. The paid version is good (not great) and worth the money.

Update Sept. 11, 2012: HikaShop is getting better all the time.

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