vbSlideshow vs Joomlaworks Frontpage Slideshow

[jim6763nva]

Ok, my writing skills are not the best.. I admit that, but I have to comment on these products.

Recently I decided to look into adding a slideshow to my forum that would display breaking news from an RSS feed or user posted news. I found I had a couple options. There may be others however the ones I took a look at were vbSlideshow and Joolmaworks Frontpage Slideshow.

I first took a look at vbSlideshow. It looked pretty cool although I was a little skeptical. I liked the fact that it was written based on vb code and would integrate with the admincp. It's unfortunate though that it is priced so high ($49.99) and the features are very limited compared to that of Joomlaworks FPSS. vbSlideshow claims to be in a version 3 too however, it's every buggy and extremely difficult to get it working. If you want to add new photos to your slideshow, you either have to manually create a new thread with photo attachment, (supposedly editing an existing thread will also update it however I was not able to get that to work) or run the "slideshow update" through the thread tools. In addition, each time you make an update to the slideshow's features from the admincp you must run the update again as mentioned before. To sum up vbSlideshow, it's very complicated to use and in my opinion not worth the $49.99 for the hassel that you have to go through. I have to admit I made the mistake and went with vbSlideshow at first for the simple fact that it integrated with the admincp. If a piece of software is designed well and works, don't soully base your decision of integration. Also, if you purchase vbSlideshow and don't like it, you're basically stuck with a bunch of nothing. Don't expect a refund and strangely enough VBCover does not allow you to change the domain that it's licensed to in the event that you should want to use it or try to get it to work on another site. Needless to say, I'm pretty upset (p.o.'d) about this. I went ahead and removed the software from my site anyway. Oh! one other thing is that in order for vbSlideshow your site must have IONCube and/or IONCube decoder installed because all of vbCover's products are encrypted.

I then took a look at Joomlaworks Frontpage Slideshow. Now granted it doesn't have a "control panel" that shows up in the admincp, but you can create a plugin that allows it to interface with vbulletin. FPSS is packed with features for a version 2.0 product. They also indicate that some big name companies are using FPSS on their sites and provide links to them. Installation was very easy and updating photos is even easier.
The install consisted of uploading the application files to your site, manually creating a plugin (about 4 lines of code, if that) in the plugin manager, adding a FPSS variable to a template where you want the slideshow to appear and manually modifying parameters in a config file. Each forum Id is defined in an array. This was a no brainer. Once you're done, ftp it back to your site and refresh the page that it's installed on. There is no need to run an update tool and the slideshow updates all images on the fly. Add or edit a thread, and the next time you refresh the page, the slideshow is displaying them. Along with the many wonderful features of Joomlaworks Frontpage Slideshow, it's ease of installation and maintenance, comes a very simple and affordable price tag of 22 Euros or around $30 USD depending on when you purchase it. I know some have purchased it for around $35, however I got a copy lastnight for $32.12 USD. Given the attractive presentation of their website, the excellent functional aspec of the software I would have expected to pay a bit more.

So... unless there is a better product out there that I don't know about. I strongly recommend looking at Joomlaworks Frontpage Slideshow for your site.

Thanks,
Jim