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Sponsored Reviews
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Written by Steve Burge
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  This is a sponsored review of the JCal Pro Calendar from TheJoomlaCalendar.com. If you're interested in having a review done, please click here.
Installation
JCal Pro does something that a lot of other developers might consider, to make things easier for end users ... when it installs it adds the component, plugins and modules all at once. No need to download then upload a variety of files. One downside ... there's a slightly confusing post-installation message saying that Joomfish isn't installed. It looks like an error, but isn't.
Menu Link
JCal Pro is also smart when you're creating a menu link for it. Rather than show people a dozen different kinds of link, JCal Pro just has one option. All the settings and options are done via the menu parameters. I find this much easier for end-users than having to decide what option they want from a list of brief titles. They can also change their mind much more easily via the parameters.
Administrator Setup
Configuring JCal comes down to just four links in the backend:
- Edit Settings: There are two global settings tabs and then everything else is divided up according to the front-end views. Want to edit the "Add event" page? Go to the "Add Event" tab. If only all configuration screens were so logically organized.
- Manage Calendars: A very nice feature that I haven't found in other Joomla components. You can create different calendars one on installation of JCal. That's a neat way of keeping unrelated or private and public events apart.
- Manage Categories: Inside each calendar, you can add basic categories and assign them a color. Its not possible to cross-categorize events or have different category levels.
- Manage Events: Adding events from the backend is relatively easy. Lets deal with that in detail:
Adding Events
The add events screen is really very straightforward. It asks you for a title, a description, a date, and your contact info. Nice and simple. You can then choose a couple of other settings ... is the event public or private? does the event repeat? The repeating events are nicely done. You can repeat events in any way you might need.
One thing missing compared to other Joomla calendars is the ability to set locations for events or allow people to register. I'm told registrations are planned for a future version.
Overall Pros
- Usabilty. Previously I preferred Eventlist. However, we ran it on one large site and we found that people we adding few events. Trying to find out why, we sat down with some users. All of them found it hard to use. We switched to JCal Pro and people found it much more intuitive. In the following weeks we had many more events submitted. The front-end event submission got a real-life thumbs up.
- Uniqueness. JCal really stands alone as the only fully-featured calendar for Joomla. There are some attempts to integrate Google Calendars but those aren't native to Joomla. Eventlist is just that ... a list of events rather than an actual calendar.
Overall Cons
- Design. The default template isn't great. Its grey and the text is somewhat hard to read. There are much better commercial templates available for $50.
- SEO. I'm told this is being fixed in the next version. Currently JCal creates a new page for every date. For example, this government site has 5000 pages indexed for only around 100 events. For SEO, lots of empty pages can have a negative impact as this guy found.
Find Out More
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