Hey Folks-
I am posting this due to my frustration with problems and how they have been handled with these modules by the vendor IBDW in the hope that something constructive will happen. They have also wasted three weeks of my time, made my site unlaunchable, and show no sign of doing anything about these issues.
Three weeks ago I bought the Megaprofile, PhotoDeluxe, 1 Col, 3 Col, and Spywall modules from IBDW after spending a while on their sample site looking at their performance. Three weeks later I still have a site that does not function correctly and support from IBDW that pretty much tells me either, that's the way it is or gets no response at all.
In their defense, yes, the modules mostly work as they do on their site. Unfortunately, until you install and start to work with these modules you don't really see what they will do. Without friends on the IBDW site to look at their information, photos, wall, and posts, you can't actually see the interaction errors. Without loading a dozen photos and manipulating them you don't see that Photodeluxe actually has eliminated many major features of the Dolphin Photo Module.
Their response time is terrible, yes, I am six hours off from them but they take an average of two days to get back to you at which time they say they don't understand the issue. Despite being given full access to my site and having some of the same problems on their site.
Enough venting, let's get to the meat and potatoes.
This is a group of five mods that are interlinked in a way that requires you have all of them to establish the look and feel of the site and proper interaction.
Major Function Issues:
Photo tagging - Tags move when you look on a different size monitor - this was finally resolved in an update after I had to PROVE it was happening by taking photos of my different monitors. I don't get how no one else had noticed this.
Spywall change comment order (a button was provided to change this) - Did absolutely nothing to the order - was finally resolved in the same update.
Uploading photos - doesn't pull the name from the computer into the box so you have to manually add a name for every photo uploaded. Our site is about photography with thousands of photos, not an acceptable reduction of operation from Boonex, response, that's the way it works.
Moving photos within an album - works perfectly in Boonex, only gives you the opportunity to delete a photo with IBDW. Still has the title "Organize" for the function. If someone uploads a series of photos that are supposed to be organized differently than the upload order this cannot be done. I'm also not sure how organize equals delete.
Album cover - since you can't change the order of the photos and the cover is the first photo you can't ever change the album cover except to delete photos until the one you want is the first one.
Share photo - instead of giving you the opportunity to share via digg, etc. like Dolphin Photo, only shares to the wall.
PhotoDeluxe comments - oldest on bottom, newest on top, no way to change the order.
Photo upload - pop up opens in IE9 but no select button appears, therefore no user on IE9 could ever upload a photo.
Issues that function but reduce user experience:
Spywall - Comments on photos and events in the photo or event appear as a note that someone commented and either three dots "..." or a shortened version of the comment with three dots after it "This is a great photo of...". If you click "comment" you are taken to the event or photo where you can add your comment. If you are looking at an event, album, or photo someone "shared" (see above about share button) which appears on the wall then your comment goes on the wall, not the event, album, or photo.
On your personal account Spywall a notification of every photo that you upload appears. Fine if you are uploading two or three photos, really irritating if you are uploading 25 or more because your wall is now just an endless list of "Paul added a new photo Name" with a thumbnail. For the rest of the community it simply says you added and album or added photos to an album.
Share on Spywall only means share to your profile, it doesn't do anything to share outside of the Dolphin system.
Once you are on this path of using their mods you have to eliminate access to other parts of the program. For example, if you don't remove the access to the original photo system then it can be accessed through search, comments posted, photos uploaded, etc. in a part of the site that no one would ever see on these modules. Not good for user experience where they will think that the site doesn't work since their comments and photos never showed up.
Good things:
Tagging in photos now works very well and for our use is an integral part of the site.
Overall look, these modules dovetail together nicely and give a very professional user interface for the user and IBDW has created their own style sheets for these modules so that you can vary link performance and view without affecting other parts of the program.
Price - for the pack of mods their pricing is good, maybe it needs to be higher so that we can get support that is less hit or miss. Frankly, I have no issue with paying to have my modules changed so that we can get our site up.
Wrap up:
My goal in writing this post is to provide information to my fellow site developers so that they know what to look for and what they are getting better than I did. If you want to look at my site in depth and see what is going on, message me for the URL and try it out.
My intent is not to throw a well reviewed mod builder under the bus but you can understand that getting no reply or a reply that 1700 users have this and they don't have a problem isn't any sort of customer service, especially on a product that is encrypted so that we can't get it fixed.
Quite frankly I have my doubts that 1700 people are running this combination of mods on D 7.0.8 or these fairly easy to notice issues would have already been addressed. IBDW deals with each one like it is a total mystery to them or they don't understand the problem, even though it occurs on their own demo site.
I have done my best for the last three weeks to not write something negative because I wanted to give IBDW an opportunity to address these issues without it being from community pressure but rather the goal to have the best possible mod. At this point the writing is in my email that they really have no interest in making this mod work correctly or improving it so that it would be even more marketable.
In the final review, I could have bought a less expensive mod to allow photo tagging and had my site running two weeks ago, now I am sitting here at my desk unable to launch my site because of a total failure in customer service by IBDW.
I invite your comments, I invite IBDW to address these issues so that my site and those of yours who have and will have these mods can have the best site possible. The current iteration of this set of mods is like a Lamborghini without a steering wheel, pretty to look at but still useless.
