Hello Horst,

Pages has been pushed to later in 1.4 and not in 1.3. Unfortunately right now we do not have an ETA for 1.3 yet.

Hi Mark,

Do you really mean with "Pages" the invite function or is it a misunderstanding? Thanks for your feedback!

Hello Horst,

Sorry but I don't quite understand what you are saying here.

Hi Mark,

I mean the functionality like "InviteX" does.

You mean invite users? Yes

Yes Mark, that's what I mean.

This sounds great! Thanks for your reply!

You are most welcome

Wait.... EasySocial is getting a built in invitation system like InviteX? This is excellent news, as I can now stop trying to 'fix' InviteX.

yeah, I fully agree. Same situation here.

Hello guys,

It's just a very basic invitation system and not a full fledged one like Invitex This is actually one of the reasons why we try not to dive ourselves into other extensions shoes because it's a little unethical and they are actually empowering EasySocial by building additional apps around the EasySocial ecosystem

Will it allow users to invite their twitter friends? and will it use the EasySocial point system? If the answer to both of those questions are yes, then it already works better than InviteX for me.

Hello,

The invitation system is purely based on emails only currently and it's not integrated with 3rd party social sites Yes it will have points if there's email invites being sent out.

Mark that might very well be, but the fewer extensions/plugins we use the better... and to be honest the quality of of your products is far superior to TechJoomla (I know I subscribe to 2-3 of their products including invitex). I don't think you should limit your product development intentionally in the fear of adding a feature that a partner/competitor already offers. Competition is what drives innovation, and if you start implementing very important and valuable features in a better way than third party developers currently do, it forces them to step up their game, and also to have more competitive prices (some 3rd party products are outrageously priced for what you get). Also, the email templates for invites end up looking different if we are using different product for invites.

I really hope you will consider adding some social site invites too.

Jannik Laursen wrote:

Mark that might very well be, but the fewer extensions/plugins we use the better... and to be honest the quality of of your products is far superior to TechJoomla (I know I subscribe to 2-3 of their products including invitex). I don't think you should limit your product development intentionally in the fear of adding a feature that a partner/competitor already offers. Competition is what drives innovation, and if you start implementing very important and valuable features in a better way than third party developers currently do, it forces them to step up their game, and also to have more competitive prices (some 3rd party products are outrageously priced for what you get). Also, the email templates for invites end up looking different if we are using different product for invites.

I really hope you will consider adding some social site invites too.

I agree with this, and have enough issues with InviteX that I am even willing to sacrifice the twitter invitation system at this point to get away from it.

Yeah, honestly, I never managed to get InviteX to work right, so I never published it. I have it installed, but don't use it.

Hey guys,

I totally understand where you are coming from and to a certain extend, I do agree with your insights. However, this situation is pretty tricky because we want to help integrators to build apps in our ecosystem and not create everything ourselves. Not only will it do harm to the core extension, it will cause maintenance nightmare in the future too.

Imagine if Apple were to build their apps all on their own. They will never reach where they are today

I have always found your ethics and focus on partnerships admirable. However, all I can say is... I have bought 4-5 of the products mentioned in your "Apps" directory, and I only use one (That is a ton of wasted money). The rest are just too poor quality with too many bugs and impossible to use UI and UX... Not to mention, I have yet to buy a third party component/plugin that integrates with EasySocial that works from the beginning. Every single one I have spent a month or two getting developers to fix problems or integrations, and I frankly don't have one working perfectly, not one.. I keep finding more and more bugs in the ones I have tried.

So I stress again. Please do not limit development for your product because you do not want to compete with third party developers. Show them how things are done properly... because I am tired of all these JomSocial integration ports which don't work. Competition is a beautiful things as it encourages innovation.

Ethics aside, I am pretty sure Mark already knows my opinion of TechJoomla, so I will not engage further in a mud slinging contest with them.
What I will say is that helping other developers to integrate with EasySocial is a great thing, but you must also consider the quality of their work.

Also keep in mind, that Apple got to where they are today by using very bad business tactics, like Forced Obsolescence, Stealing code from other developers and integrating into their own, and running direct propaganda and smear campaigns against their competition.
Do you really want to be like Apple?

Also, Jannik,
I am not sure what extensions you are running, or what issues you are encountering, but I think we might need a new thread to discuss this as a community.
First there are quite a few extensions that I would like to get, but I would prefer to not bother with them if they are going to be filled with bugs and require days of work to get them running correctly.
Second we might be able to collectively as a community 'iron out' any of the issues these extensions are having for one another.

Well in regards to the apple comments. I actually am an Apple fan, but talking about Apple, they have very strict guidelines for third party apps. So there is a level of quality control that is impossible to implement in the Joomla world.

Jthm0138, I have bought so many extensions that I don't remember all that I am subscribed to. But I can give you a quick guideline based on Developer Teams I have bought products from:

JFBConnect - Excellent! Great product and excellent support.

Offlajn - Excellent! Fantastic products and best support I have ever received, they literally will help you customize their products to your site if you ask nicely... and they helped me fix issues that had nothing to do with their products.

Yoo Recipe! - Pretty good, still have a long way to go, but they are proactive and despite experiencing several compatibility bugs, I still would recommend them. They have earned my business by being proactive.

TechJoomla - OK, they have a good portfolio of products, but lack of quality control and have poor UI/UX/Design in most of their products... That said, I am cautiously excited for their ES App.

JoomPlace - Hate to say it, but unless you really need one of their products, stay away from now. Terrible UI/UX/Design, terrible quality control, nothing but headaches so far. They mean well, but rather than being proactive, they are reactive. Meaning, they don't do sufficient testing prior to releasing their products, but they will gladly hack/patch bugs. Also, they have sooo many products that there is no way that they can properly maintain any of them. Classic case of trying to do too much.

I will have to keep an eye on JFBConnect and see if they add in auto sync features. If they do I would prefer to use that over Broadcast.

As for TechJoomla, if you have everything actually functioning at this point I can probably help you with the UI and Design. InviteX was a nightmare to theme, but everything else of theirs that I have played with was really quite easy to theme. One of the advantages to them not putting much effort into design, is that it makes their products really easy to modify the layouts.

haha, I don't have anything of theirs working currently, I have all but given up to integrate any of them, I just cant make any of them feel like a seamless experience. I have InviteX and jLike installed, but never managed to get them to work right. But what components of theirs have you managed to style well? Got any cool overrides or e-mail templates for InviteX, jLike or SocialAds you could share? I might give them another shot, if I can integrate them nicely. I am quite good at CSS, so if you have a base I can work on for any of them, that would be appreciated.

P.S. I am not sure exactly what you mean by auto sync feature, but you could request it on their forums. They have previously fulfilled my requests.

I currently only use SocialAds, and will be redoing the user interface on it for my site next week.
I will be more than happy to make a tutorial on the exact changes I make to get a better UI.

I did have InviteX installed at one point, but could not get it to work the way I needed it to, so I have removed it from my site. The email templates are pretty easy to work with and get good results from, but the twitter portion of it (the part I wanted) is just a nightmare. The biggest issue was the User Interface on the site, it was not designed with custom templates in mind.
The other one that I had installed at one point was jBolo. jBolo can be made to look really cool, but functionality on it is lacking at best, and if you are not on a private server it is not even worth trying.

Side Note: CommetChat (not TechJoomla) functioned correctly, but it also will slow down page load times drastically. I finally settled on JChatSocial, it had a nice balance of function and speed, but ultimately privacy control issues made me remove chat from my site completely.

Mark,
I understand your stance, and will not push the issue, but if I could make one request/suggestion for invitations, it would be for the inclusion of URL invitation on top of email invitations. Where each user would get a unique url with their invitation code on it that they could send to friends to get credit for inviting them to the site.

Ah excellent, yes please share your tweaks with us, as I intend to implement SocialAds as well.

I agree with the Chat situation, I tried several. Including Arrow Chat & CometChat. Currently I have had to disable CometChat due to some bugs and site slowdown, but it is definitely the best hosted solution I have tried. Sadly, I have not been able to get one working the way I want yet.

and I think I am going to scrap InviteX too, too much hassle to get to work right.

Hello Mark,

the problem as the guys suggested is the lack of quality control applied by other extension providers. it's not good for stackidea reputation and for the joomla community to have stackideas listing extension developers as partners and publishing their extensions in the addones page without checking quality of the product.

I do understand that working with several extension developers is hard to deal with specially when you have to worry about your own products but think of us users who would want to use easysocial with invitex, socialads and another extension. the first problem is having 4 different email notification templates.
there is a solution but it needs commitment

1- your partners needs to understand that integrating their extensions means that they need to have a real integration, from design to functionality. this way at least we know that the partners of stackideas are good to purchase! if they don't do it, then im not sure you can call them partners
2- they need to respect the partnership and have a solid extensions with minimum bugs. in the end you are associating yourself with these companies and your reputation is effected by their work


now techjoomla is building the mobile app for easysocial and you guys have provided them with the apps they have requested. after seeing so many negative feedback about their extensions ( i had a bad experience myself with socialads and email beautifier before) the people who are waiting badly for this app to be published will surely wonder, how good this app is going to be???

with all due respect to them, they have been there in the joomla world for so long and they still have so many bad reviews, then how can we expect the new app to be good?


I'm not picking on techjoomla for sure, they are just an example, and although i had a bad experience with their products, it wasn't bad to the point of me not giving them another chance. i would love to give them another chance and i will when they are done with the mobile app, but i'm really worried of the quality and talking about your concerns is never a bad thing.


Regards,

Thanks for the heads up on this guys and I appreciate it very much! I cannot really comment on these extensions right now but I am definitely going to forward this to the respective companies so that they are able to review on their existing codes / apps / UX . I guess a much stricter control over published apps is required.

Mark wrote:

Thanks for the heads up on this guys and I appreciate it very much! I cannot really comment on these extensions right now but I am definitely going to forward this to the respective companies so that they are able to review on their existing codes / apps / UX . I guess a much stricter control over published apps is required.

Thanks Mark. Yes, there should be more quality control and stricter guidelines. Because as I said, I have 100s of dollars worth of subscriptions to components & plugins that I cannot use, due to compatibility issues, bugs, terrible UI/UX/Design. I think one of the major reasons is because A. a lot of these products are ports from old products used to extend JomSocial functionality... and B. they are afraid to copy your design.

If you made it a requirement to have brand new code and UI, rather than just porting over old products meant for JomSocial... and if you offered design guidelines/templates like your e-mail template and buttons for EasySocial integrated products. We would be much more inclined to use third party products.

P.S. On a sidenote, I do want to voice my opinion about letting third party developers create components that really should just be an EasySocial feature. I have noticed a trend of you not wanting to implement some basic important features in the fear of overstepping partners/competitors. I want to remind you that a lot of those "Single Feature" components were born due to JomSocial being an incomplete product. I am all for paying for feature rich multi purpose components... but some of TechJoomlas products really are just features and don't warrant slowing the site down further with a whole component and tons of plugins just to add a feature that is lacking... not to mention some of their products, as they are designed to be a feature, rather than a stand alone component, like jLike... require us to create a template override folder and modify code in various files and updates those overrides when components get updated.

Thanks for the heads up on this Jannik and we did actually thought about this one too but we'll see how we can actually implement this.

Thanks Mark for once again taking my feedback into consideration. I genuinely appreciate it.

Not a problem at all Jannik

The email invite system sounds pretty decent to me. Just tack on the ability to invite from facebook and Twitter and it would pretty much have all it needs (this can be added later). Inviting from facebook or twitter has been around for quite some time. So in that regard the stacked team has every right to add those on. I will however agree with Mark that we don't want to copy what TechJoomla has done so that ES remains ethical in how features are added. I'm sure there is a method of having social media invites while not using TechJoomla's methods. As long as we get the top 2 or three key players in social media, I'm sure that would satisfy folks for quite some time.

After thinking about it for quite some time this is what I have come to.
If we have an email invitation system, and a URL invitation system. That worked with the EasySocial Points system (and hopefully badge system) that would be perfect.

I was originally focused on getting Twitter invites, then I realized, that I (and most people that use twitter and facebook) just ignore all the private message invites anyways. Posting a link as a tweet or status update on Twitter/Facebook would be much more effective.

Look at built in Facebook Connect vs JFBConnect. I subscribed to JFBConnect because they offer more customization such as autologin. With invites, even if Stackideas were to offer multiple invite systems like FB and Twitter, those who want more customization and features can buy third party addons. That is how it should work, include the important basics that the masses will use, and leave the specialized customization for third party developers to offer.

Personally, I am subscribed to InviteX but I don't use it because it is pure junk. I really hope Stackideas implements the most important invite services such as FB and Twitter.

One question? will the email invite crawl your email and make a list of people you can invite or of people who already are signed you which you can befriend the way it does on LinkedIn? or do you manually write in emails?

@Jthm0138: Good insight, your probably right that many folks would simply ignore the facebook invite. But a method of sharing it as a status post on facebook would be far more useful and would steer away from the TechJoomla method. The invite should then automatically reference that user so that successful invites give them points. This should of course be configurable (some admins might be worried about point abuse using fake accounts).

Josh Lewis wrote:

@Jthm0138: Good insight, your probably right that many folks would simply ignore the facebook invite. But a method of sharing it as a status post on facebook would be far more useful and would steer away from the TechJoomla method. The invite should then automatically reference that user so that successful invites give them points. This should of course be configurable (some admins might be worried about point abuse using fake accounts).

I would be one of those admins worried about point abuse by creating fake accounts (you can cash out points on my site for things that cost me money). The best solution for this is to track who invited who, with something like an auto-completed referral field, then if someone is creating a bunch of fake accounts you just ban their IP address from the site.

or set it so that you only can get points for sharing on facebook once or once a month etc.

Hi Guys,

Would like to add my 2 cents
I'm customizing apps as to incorporate them in ES for 1.3 and having post anything in 2-3 weeks since.
I saw the forum being quite active.
Mark even if there isn't an ETA for 1.3, can you develop about the roadmap on the site (1.4 was set for august) and the features statuts.
As for everyone, we are not 100% quite satisfy with early build of some extensions.
I'm at the point that (even if its been a month), I would like to see where we are heading for developement. Can the roadmap+features be adjust etc ?

Don't want to work in the 1.2.* structure with the many changes and some stuff cannot be fixed until then.

As usual, keep up the good work : )))

Alex

Hello Alexandre,

We're actually really occupied right now with our development and we will only be updating the roadmap for 1.4 when 1.3 is out. Don't worry, there won't be much structural changes in 1.3 and even if there is, we try our best to keep legacy support for older codes.

Major changes will be on 1.4

Jannik - Mark that might very well be, but the fewer extensions/plugins we use the better... and to be honest the quality of of your products is far superior to TechJoomla (I know I subscribe to 2-3 of their products including invitex). I don't think you should limit your product development intentionally in the fear of adding a feature that a partner/competitor already offers. Competition is what drives innovation...

I agree with Jannik on this statement 100% I am actually glad that Mark and his team started a A+ quality Joomla Components and superb support. These qualities has not been a strong suit in Joomla component developers, well, some but StackIdeas been on the top of my list and I have not worked with any other big Joomla components that can match StackIdeas' support ethics.

I remember reading an article how Steve Jobs got the idea of building the iPad, it was not his original idea but it was Microsoft's. My point is, they are doing it wrong!

I also personally would pay for ES Add-On built by StackIdeas, it's not necessarily have to be all free. I would guess other customers would be willing to pay as well. The Chat system for one is a major add-on, I don't expect that it should come with ES core. Invite is kind of an inclusive feature in a Social world so it has to part of the core

Jackson

Personally I have had it with TechJoomla. I have payed for 3 of their extensions, and have checked out almost all of the others as well at this point, and not a single one of their extensions has all the features that they advertise, the code is all very poor, and the support is horrific. I would not go as far as saying TechJoomla is a scam, but they are absolutely a fraudulent company, and I would be very concerned about any company that willingly partners with them.

The fact that I know StackIdeas is passing some features on to TechJoomla has me 2nd guessing my choice of EasySocial. I really hope some other reputable developers start making EasySocial extensions.

EasyChat from Stack-Ideas! I would subscribe to that!
EasyInvite from Stack-Ideas would appear to me too. :-)

I'm curious to see how techjoomla is going to respond to all those criticism. They need to be notified if they don't know about this thread

Sean Carney wrote:

EasyChat from Stack-Ideas! I would subscribe to that!
EasyInvite from Stack-Ideas would appear to me too. :-)

Well, if you look at JomSocial, their current developers, iJoomla do create some of the most important third party components and integrations for JomSocial. Additionally, they have an exclusive JomSocial Chat with some partner software company. This has bought them a certain level of quality control and quality of integration on some very important fronts. If you look at all of their component backends they look the same, and they are developed with seamless integration in mind. It has been a long journey, but it looks like they are on the right track on some important fronts. Finally.

That said, I have many issues with JomSocial and iJoomla... and their pricing model for their chat is a total scam. I like that they don't charge for the chat and only for hosted subscription, but they hardly give you any slots. It is a joke compared to CometChats and ArrowChats pricing.

Also, having talked to both the Developers of CometChat and jBolo I can confirm that both of them are bringing out EasySocial Conversations integrations into their chats. Which is good. Except, neither chat is ideal. One slows down your site a lot and the other seems to be bug riddled.

I honestly feel bad for Stackideas, because they have set a wonderful standard of development, and they have had such a wonderful and open policy with other developers, encouraging integrations and addons. But, these other developers have all rushed their products to the market, instead of ensuring the same quality as we as Stackideas subscribers have come to expect.

I certainly am with the people in this thread who are suggesting Stackideas to develop some of the most important and thought after add-ons in house... and for some of them I would be willing to pay money for. Although, not necessarily all... as I have mentioned previously, a lot of the components that TechJoomla offer are actually features, rather than standalone components. Very few of them warrant an individual component, but have been born due to JomSocials lack of product evolution. As JomSocial failed to add important features, other developers saw that as an opportunity to fill a void. Now, I am noticing that Stackideas is deliberately creating these same voids for the sake of not offending these third party developers.

I personally say, make EasySocial as full featured as possible, do not keep features off the table just because TechJoomla offers an extension for that task. Most of them should be implemented into the core of EasySocial. But if from a product development perspective it makes sense to create a standalone component, I can respect that.

@Jthm0138 LOL! from the sound of what you just said about TechJoomla, I'm sorry you had a terrible experience with them. But thank you for sharing your disappointment. I have communicated with Parth and Ashwin from TechJoomla via email regarding a development project for my side business and they seemed to be a reasonable guy. I have personally worked on JGive, one of their component, it is not perfect but the current version looks descent compared to the previous. I guess they are working hard to update their components. And they are open to suggestions as well, it is just they are not like StackIdeas where you point out issues and they fix is ASAP.

Mark it's your fault hahaha it's because of your support ethics people now are getting use to that quality and looking for it from other developers. seriously, I've told several component developers like Zoo and some other about your support and wish from them to follow it. I hope they will

I hope more Joomla Developers will provide quality products and support in the future. StackIdeas quality I should say, reasonable pricing, fast support, quality code, and listens to customer.

Jackson

With respect to Techjoomla, I can not help wonder if they should concentrate on a couple of core products instead of tons of faulty products. I only purchased one product (Broadcast) and it is buggy as hell. I too have given up trying to configure it and will remove it from my Site. I do not pay them money so that I can be a beta tester for beta products!!!

I am usually an early adopter and soooo want to get on with Techjoomla! Particularly with respect to their upcoming LMS & Application… But as much as it saddens me to say this I can not imagine how this can/will work!!! Presently I am on the side lines with respect to Techjoomla and will not be giving them any more money until I see evidence (positive feedback in forums) that they are stepping up their game!

Interesting discussions here I wish to participate more but unfortunately I am grilled to the development part of both EasyBlog and EasySocial I have to agree with Paul here though, we should only focus on several core main projects rather than focusing on a huge variety of apps / addons