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Oh gosh! Been awhile since I wrote here.  We've been completely swamped by the impending launch of one of the most complex sites I've worked on. We're using a bunch of extensions with a variety of compliance to Joomla 1.5 coding standards. None of them perfect, but some pretty darn close.

Joomsuite has been a mixed blessing. Having the code encrypted makes it more difficult for me to be excited about it. The idea is fantastic, but I'm finding it's capabilities - at least for our purposes - quite limited. And it's buggy. And it has a long way to go to meet my standards for a fully Joomla 1.5 compliant extensions.

Given the desires of the client, and Joomsuite's limitations, I ended up writing a component to fill in the the gaps. This is where the blessing gets really mixed. I've been pretty surprised what I've been able to do, but it's created a number of nightmares for maintaining control over how and where to display content. But overall, I'm pretty impressed with some of the things I can do with Joomsuite and in the ways I've been able to get my component to cross-talk with it.

Virtuemart - oh yes, the ultimate Joomla store. It's complicated, it's a bit obtuse in many places (a lot obtuse in others) and its heritage as a Joomla 1.0 component is more than a little obvious. I've found a few bugs I had to patch, but overall I'm really impressed with what can be done.

MyBlog (on which I'm writing this right now) - I'd say the best of the bunch. I needed to dive into the code for some reason awhile back and was a little disappointed at some of the ways it doesn't follow J15  structures, but that's really a quibble at this point.

sh404SEF (I told you this was coming!) I just installed 1.0 beta 147 for J15. It's a bit scary, but Mikey! I think I like it! I haven't had to look at code directly yet (thank goodness!) and that's mainly because it all seems to work out of the box and is going to solve some of our remaining needed-for-launch items. Virtuemart works like a champ under it and MyBlog doesn't seem to care one way or the other (thank you Azrul!!). I'm not surprised that I'm going to have to write a SEF extension for Joomsuite and rsgallery, and of course the three in-house components I've written will need the same. But sh400sef makes this look easy. But of course, the code still has to written by someone. Oh - that's me - better get back to work...