Dear Michal

Call me an idealist, but one of the reasons I believe in Open Source Software is community support.

Community in the sense that support goes both ways. We not so knowledgeable programmers support you developers by providing extensive testing (this is actually an investment of hours of work) which you the developers use to improve your code.

As the theory goes in the end you get software which is developed faster, cheaper, and works more reliably than commercial software.

With all due respect to your right, and existential need to make a profit out of your work, I think your attitude that your product works most of the time, and anyone who has trouble should pay you to fix it is flawed. Software should work, regardless of the other plugins running.

If your only solution to a bug is paid support, then why wait two months to tell us? If every developer working on the joomla project took this approach then nothing would work.

I have spent hours trying all the different possible configurations of the various plugins you have mentioned above, and found the results to be inconsistent, and buggy.

The developers of Joomfish, and Breezing Forms both reacted immediately to sort out similar issues relating to their software in a matter of days. I have supported both of these developers with donations, one before the problem even occured, and one after solving the problem (without any asking on the part of the developer). Their commitment to their products impresses me.

I have been using JoomSEF for about two years on a J1.0.x site with joomfish and facile forms, because you were the first SEF plugin to support Joomfish. I would have bought a paid version, but because I had always planned to change the domain on my web site, I could not buy into your scheme of paying per URL until I had finally decided upon the final URL...

No doubt it is difficult to find a model for making money from such work. I think it makes a difference what model you use, and I think that in general a satisfied customer who feels safe using your product, and feels that the developer is keen to improve his product and resolve bugs is more likely to contribute financially than one who has the feeling that his issues are not being addressed - even if they seem irrelevant to the developer.

All general discussions aside, I invested another half hour of testing time, trying all the configurations you suggested, to no avail. The results are mixed. if I switch off JFrouter, the translations do not work, if it is on, most things work, but some links from within the text of articles do not resolve properly landing a 500 error, while other links work.


kind regards

MGriffin

Hello MGriffin,

well, I would not call you an idealist as I generally agree with you.

But let me ephasise some of the ideas. First of all the strongest should be the community support, that is right. However a lot of users here is complaing about our slow reactions on these forums, as they obviously do not understand, what community support means. In my eyes, that is users helping each other and not requesting support from developers with guearanteed 2-days response time.

Moreover, answers to most of the questions appearing here can be found in documentation or in FAQs.

Secondly, we of course try to help users catch out bugs our users experience. Why wouldn't we? We want to offer fully functional piece of software.
However, if the bug is hard to identify and appears on your site and not on hundreds or thousands others (including our testing site), the main debug and identification part is on your side, as we are generally unable to simulate your specific site with all its settings components & plugins.
So in that case, either we need you to provide us with as much information as possible to be able to track the bug in code - or even tell us where you think it might be and why - or we need to get access to your site and do the debugging test there ourselves. But starting from this point, we already consider such service paid support as in most cases it turns out it is either some misconfiguration (Joomla or webserver) or it is the problem of several different components not being able to work together, which we do not feel responsible for.

So that is just to give you our point of view. As long as we can give you hint here on forum (unless it is listed in FAQs), we will gladly do so. If you report a bug with sufficient information to remove it without days of testing in specific conditions, we will welcome that. But at the time you say just "it does not work for me, do something about it". we can only offer you checking the problem at your site ourselves and then we consider this a paid service.

That was something in general, to your specific problem: we are running JoomSEF + JoomFIsh really on dozens of site ourselves without slightest problem. If you say that after switching Jfrouter off the translation ceases to work that is strange. To make translations working, you need just Jfdatabase, not Jfrouter. Jfrouter just does partly the same job as JoomSEF and that is also reason, why these to plugins cannot be on at the same time as they are mutually interfering.

Best regards,
Michal

Dear Michal

thanks for your extensive answer. It is certainly a dillemma to which there is no easy answer.

I have fiddled around a bit more, and have got it mostly working now with jfRouter switched off.

the only thing that still does not work is the places where I use php to change stuff in the forms and languages - for example:




Perhaps joomSEF uses a different method or format for the language.


Any suggestions on how to sort this out?


kind regards

mGriffin

Well, that may really be a problem.
To make this work smoothly with JoomSEF & JoomFish, you should create such content:
1. either as part of article that gets translated by JoomFish (by including some PHP code in the article)
or
2. by adding a JoomFish translation definition to work with the component you use for forms and so on;

Of course in this case when you use your own "proprietary" solution to do the translations, you cannot expect that the other components will work as you might expect under all circumstances; you need to respect the APIs.

Best regards,
Michal

hallo michal

I use this solution in three spots

1. index.php for the whole site to translate the site motto
2. in a breezing forms module
3. in a breezing form shown in line

your solution 1 will not work for 1 and 2.

I do not quite understand what you mean in solution 2

Is there a similar global defined by joomSEF where I can pick up the language in php?

mGrififn

To any one with similar issues:

the guys at JoomFish were very helpful, and suggested I use JText to do my translations.

I stored the tranlated the words in the file en-GB.com_facileforms.ini like this:



Then modified my original piece to this:



I had originally tried to store the form translations with the site motto in my template's ini file en-GB.tpl_minilofttemplate.ini but for some yet unknown reason BreezingForms cannot access it, so for now they remain in a less ideal spot.

Now everything is working together like a charm.