General Talk/Questions/Comments

[dynamite01]

I bought the member ship and I am not impressed with the activity on this forum. I downloaded a site and shape5 made it sound so easy and that made suggestions that it is e-commerce ready and easy , etc... Well, it is easy if you know css, php and all of the coding to make it like they claim. And you have to load the e-commerce software after they said they tweeked it to match the template which in no way looked like the installed product with dummy data and all. Not even close. You have to modify code and all? What's up shape5.
I say all of this respectfully and maybe I just don't know shape5 well enough but the other template providers made it a snap. This almost seems like they made it proprietary. Also I must comment that I am scared to load 3rd party extensions because of all of the bugs. Now bugs I understand. This is all open source but come on everyone. Why release a product that is so buggy. Spend an extra 60k a year and get a real tester to try to break things and beta and bug test the crap out of it. I used to be a bug/beta and MIS Director and I would never release something until it is 95%. But this website seems so inactive. Ok, now comment to me on how dumb I am but do not lock me out of forums for expressing myself. I am obviously impressed by the sales pitch on joining. Some one set me straight.....I am afraid to tell you the template because they will toss me over to some other very non active part of this forum.

[mikek]

Hello,

I'm sorry to hear you're having problems with the product. As to the activity on our forum boards we actually do have an extremely active forum on our site. We gets dozens of posts every day and they monitored by our staff routinely. If you have specific issues in the forum board pertaining to the template you are using we can address those specific issues from there. Our products are fully tested before release.

Installation instructions are available to the general public on each template's demo and here for anyone to view before they purchase as well:

http://www.shape5.com/joomla_tutorials.html

[dynamite01]

Thank you for listening and I will do the same. 
Mike

[jonahh]

We don't include 3rd party, non Shape 5 extensions,components in our quick installs (site shapers) because of updates that would need to be added to them and even though GPL we don't like redistributing them on our site.  So this is why for the ecommerce templates they aren't included.  But all edits to CSS etc are included so all you have to do is install the 3rd party software and perhaps publish modules from it, like shopping cart, product modules, etc.

So with this scenario we do realize that you may need support for this if you aren't familiar with how to go about all this.  As mike said we do have tutorials in above URL and also on each demo we  have tutorials.  For example our newest ecommerce template has a tutorial on how to set it up here (lots of specifc to template tutorials are on our demos):
http://shape5.com/demo/shopping_bag/index.php/tutorials-mainmenu-48/setting-up-virtuemart-and-redshop

If you do need help outside all this post in the board specific to your template and someone will help you from there.  We try to stick to a 24hr response time.  So when you post within 24hrs you will be responded to.  This is only mon-fri, weekends are not guaranteed.

Hope this helps and we are happy to have you here!

[rarinc]

its always a good idea to try something out before you buy.  there are  free templates and modules available that you can use to practice and get familiar with.

[q405iqy1b3]

You may find it hard with Shape5, but you will find it harder elsewhere!

That sounds lame I know, but let me explain ...

I initially came to Shape5 because I tried to do it myself. I bought a template elsewhere, and tried to build a site using various extensions that I mixed and matched. And it was a disaster. Extension X didn't work with template Y, nor with extension Z. There were endless problems and complications. It was insane.

And I am a software engineer -- been programming for over 30 years (although curiously I have never written a PHP program -- go figure!).

So I decided to use one template and extension provider and simply live within their ecosystem. I picked Shape5.

Am I 100% happy with Shape5's stuff? No. Their templates are very nice! But their extensions have some issues (e.g. the news ticker doesn't pull from articles, you have to put your content into the 10 slots provided -- in general I wish Shape5 would pursue a policy of abstracting the content provision away from the module functionality in a uniform manner, but ...)

But, it is a thousand times better than doing it yourself, especially since their support is generally pretty helpful!

The real problem isn't Shape5. The real problem is Joomla -- if you are going to have an extensible system then the first and most important thing you must get right, is that extensions don't conflict with one another (i.e. you must have a compositional extension system). Sadly Joomla messed this up. PHP and CSS can take part of the blame, but only part.