My initial impression was I liked the component and it was better looking and laid out than the competitors, I was a fan. However, when I tried adding events, there was no option for them to be “private” unless I was logged in as a site administrator. All events added by regular users were public and required approval by an administrator. I went through the instructions multiple times and still couldn’t get it working.

So on September 20 I posted a message on the JCal support forums requesting help. After a day or so I got a response from the developers, Anything Digital, that they were looking in to it and then a follow up saying they’ve confirmed it was a bug and I could expect a fix in 24-48 hrs. So far so good, bugs happen, I can accept that, I was still a fan. But then things started to go downhill …

I waited 48hrs for the fix … nothing. So I posted a “bump” reminder message on the forums to get an update.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. No communication at all. I posted another message on their forums asking for a response and letting them know I was starting to think about asking for a refund and that so far I’d have little option to write a not very positive review on the Joomla Extensions catalogue.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. So I posted again, requesting a refund. Their official policy says “no refunds”, but I pointed out that a credit card chargeback would cost them more than a refund, so they may want to reconsider, and that continuing to advertise it as offering “private calendars” was false advertising. On September 28 I also wrote a review on Joomla.org describing my experience.

Another 24hrs went by and finally a response – more than a week after I was told I could expect a fix within 24-48 hrs. I was told that the fix was with beta testers and they also issued me with a refund and closed my account with them. September 29.

This was more than a little confusing. What I wanted was private calendars. I only asked for a refund after it seemed apparent they couldn’t provide them anytime soon and had poor support. If they had a fix and it would soon be available, I was more than willing to wait – all they had to do was tell me what was going on!

I was annoyed, but left it at that until today. Why? Well, yesterday my review on Joomla Extensions had now been approved by the Joomla.org site admins and was posted along with a response by Anything Digital claiming the issue was resolved with a link back to the forums (update: the review has mysteriously been removed). I thought, great, I still don’t have a solution maybe I’ll buy it again! So I went to the forums and got this response -

Sorry david_steadson, you are banned from using this forum!
Gave a bad JED review even though we refunded his money

This was completely false! I gave the bad review only after I’d waited a week for a response, and a day before I was issued the refund. Furthermore, when I went to the forums without logging in, there was nothing new in the thread except the acknowledgment it had been sent to testing. After looking around the site some more I found something even more irritating … they have indeed finally publicly issued the fix!

I still need a private calendar solution. What do I do? Give them the money again despite the bad experience with their support, including being outright dishonest in the statement above? Right now I don’t know what I should do. Their software is licenced under GPL which means anyone who has it is free to share it around, so I could just wait until somebody does that, but it could be weeks or months.

I like the software. I want to use it. I would have been a fan and written positively about them, but instead because of their lack of communication they’ve turned me into a foe, with a post like this on the internet for googlers to find for years to come.

UPDATE 2010-01-01: I now have the latest version of JCalPro version 2.2.7.441 and the Private Calendars functional still does not work, with users additions requiring administrator approval even for their own private activities.

This functionality is planned with Joomla 1.6, but as is often the case, I needed a solution now. Fortunately I managed to come up with one and I thought I’d share it.

The solution uses Stephen Brandon’s powerful MetaMod module. MetaMod allows you to enable various “rules” on a Joomla page for turning modules on and off, writing particular messages, redirecting – whatever you can come up with. Using MetaMod I created a rule that checks to see if the logged on user is a member of the GroupJive group connected to the forum he/she is trying to view. If they are not then it redirects them to another page. It does the same if anyone attempts to view the parent category. This step isn’t necessary if the parent category is unpublished in Kunena.

To enable this solution, download and install MetaMod and publish it on the Kunena forum component page. In my template I publish it with no title, in the footer, and with class -nobox so that it’s effectively invisible to users. In the module itself I set the following PHP code -

//
// Block access to GroupJive Forums
//
$group_catid=21;
$redirect_url='/';
$catid = JRequest::getVar("catid");
//Redirect if in main group category
if ($catid==$group_catid)
{
      $app->redirect($redirect_url);
}
// check if forum is in group category
$query="select parent from jos_fb_categories where id=".$catid;
$db->setQuery( $query, 0, 1 );
$row = $db->loadObject();
$parent_id= $row->parent;
if ($parent_id==$group_catid)
{
$username = $user->username;
$gj_query = "SELECT username FROM jos_gj_users
INNER JOIN jos_gj_jb ON jos_gj_users.id_group=jos_gj_jb.group_id 
where category_id=".$catid." and username='".$username."'";
$db->setQuery( $gj_query, 0, 1 );
$gj_row = $db->loadObject();
$gj_username = $gj_row->username;
if (is_null($gj_username))
{
      $app->redirect($redirect_url);
}
}

There are two things you need to change in the first few lines of code. $group_catid should be set to the Kunena category ID where your having GroupJive create forums. $redirect_url should be set to wherever you want the user to end up instead of the private forum. You may want to setup an error message page. In the future I think I’ll set mine to redirect to the main groupjive page with an error message stating the forums are private and they need to join. Alternatively I might simply redirect back to the page they came from. That’s it!

Alas, our experience with ZipCodeShop (ZCS), despite starting well, has not been a good one. I contacted them and told them I was looking at buying both components, and they were more than helpful. I purchased the ZCS Community Builder component, for US$99, and started trying to implement it in my site. I sort of got it working, and for 2 days ZCS support via email were extremely fast, and extremely helpful – though they did continue to ignore requests to be given access to their support forums. The component itself was encoded and hardcoded with a licence linked to my domain name. This concerned me as we had plans to change the domain name, but they assured me it would be no problem to do so. After a couple of days I was still having a few problems, and they informed me a new version was coming the following week, and that prices would be increasing - so I should buy the Moset’s tree version straight away. I elected not to do so.

That was in February. Since then I have lodged more than a dozen support ticket requests and followups through their online ticketing system. I have sent numerous emails directly. I have left messages with their Live Online Support. I’ve even tried several international phone calls. Nothing. I would be concerned they had gone of business, or the principles had some serious health issues or similar, but at the end of April a message appeared on their site stating they were upgrading their site and the new one would be up at the end of the week. At the end of the week, the message disappeared but nothing else changed. Thus, I’m left with an encoded component who’s bugs I cannot fix, and which I cannot easily customised for my purposes, as I was assured I could.

Sadly, posts on Joomlapolis indicate my experience is not unique. I left further messages last week advising ZipCodeShop I would be doing this blog post, but there has been no response.

In the meantime I’ve developed a replacement component to the ZipCodeShop radius search component using the excellent Fabrik development framework, available at www.fabrikar.com. For those who have been left wanting by ZCS I’ll try to blog about my solution in the next week.