To keep using JR or not?

Hi All, been a while! I have had my site down for a few years, and since JR5 I am really unsure if JR still has all the features I would want. Really the change was very discouraging for me, having put So much time and effort into getting my JR4 site where I wanted it to be! Are you still able to set the % admin gets from member sales? And what about all those awesome mods we had like the Affiliate mod and the never quite finished "battle of the bands" mod?
Also I notice that all the JR4 license info is just gone? I felt a real sense of disconnect from the JR community when the upgrade happened.. I miss the old days and the old system.
updated by @whodaniel: 11/17/14 10:45:15AM

If you don't like what you see with JR5, there's no reason you have to stop using JR4. There are also lots of other CMS's out there as well that might be more in line with what you're looking for.

At this time we don't have an affiliate module, but the User Polls module can double as sort of a "Battle" module if you need something like that.

All the Jamroom 4 licenses and everything are still available online at the archive site:

http://archive.jamroom.net/

Hope this helps!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Hi WD - Good to see you again.
Just to add to what Brian said, a lot of the functionality that were additional modules in JR4 has been built into JR5 modules, so most of the features can still be done, albeit 'differently'.
Why don't you give JR5 a try? Yes, its different, but with a short learning curve you'll hopefully see that its better. Checkout the documentation pages and some of the 'how to' videos there.
The JR5 Core is free. All the modules you'll need (and more) can be found in the SuperPack (we can do a discount on that for existing JR4 users.
Also, you can import your old JR4 site to JR5 (or can can do it for you as a service).
For a lot of JR5 customers (myself included), JR5 has 'revivalised' their websites and their users really appreciate the new features and how much easier it is to use.
hth
Pa


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

It's always a tough call I had been using PhpFox on and off for years and with their upcoming V4 they are taking a path I don't want to follow. 3rd party Addons as a service, where a site owner would subscribe to the module and never have any code on their own server. Add to this the guy that did the music section on my site sadly passed away earlier this year it leaves it hard to stay there.

I am back evaluating Jamroom again, and although I have bought a lot of the modules I still haven't made up my mind.

Can I redo what I had with PhpFox? For the most part yes, but it will take a lot more work from me to do it with Jamroom. I can see the finished product but it's getting there that will be the hard bit.

Attracting developers to any system at the moment is tough as sales are down everywhere, the hobbyist social network craze has slowly been dying these past few years.

This is good feedback - thanks for that. I'd love to hear what you feel makes JR hard to customize or get setup as you want - ideally most things should be just "enable it and set it up in your quotas".

I do know that customizing the JR skin can be a little work, but we kind of knew that when we decided to try and make 100% of JR templated.


Yeah this is very true - and was a very big driving factor in the JR5 redesign. We need a way to go beyond the "platform for a social network", and while a lot of JR5 modules are still geared in that direction (since a lot of our customer base is still private social networking) with our other projects like Proxima and Genosis you can see that JR can be used for more than just a social network setup.

Thanks!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Well PhpFox was more a plug and go solution, since it had a wider range of 3rd party modules, from stores, business directory, auctions to social ads, gamification (for want of a better term) modules etc. it meant if you could afford them you could build a site very quickly.

My biggest problem with jamroom currently is my lack of knowledge of smarty tbh, I am the type of person that can hack things together but if I have to start from scratch I soon lose interest. I'd sooner pay someone else for modules as for me it would usually be more cost effective.

Creating a Business directory with JR wouldn't be all that hard really, a new quota, a more business like profile layout, and your almost there.

The music side is handled very well, just need to tie the various related modules into seamless sections, so for example Music Charts would be comprised of Soundcloud and Local audio tracks. Audio lists would comingle both seamlessly.

Same for Videos, Youtube and Vimeo, And photo galleries/Flickr. I feel having the separate sections on profiles leaves it a bit too complicated. To the user of the site it should all be together in the respective sections and then if a quota doesn't have access to any of the modules it wont mean there stuff is segmented somewhere else.

The timeline will take some getting used to I am more accustomed to a Facebook like wall, but I don't think it would be a massive job to adapt the timeline either. Remove 140 character limit, support JrEmbed so media could be directly embedded in timeline. And fix the comment links, sometimes when you click a link in the timeline you just get redirected to the timeline rather that going to the item shown. (But that may be a misunderstanding on my part).

I'd also be thinking about cloning followers and adding the notion of friends to the system.

That seems like a lot of negative but JR has a lot of advantages over PhpFox

Much cheaper to get started for starters
Responsive out of the box
Form Designer really is nice
Aparna, having the functions to post to timeline etc all cloned is nice and well thought out.
Marketplace in admin
Option to roll back to previous version at the click of a button, very nice
I love the fact that the few 3rd party modules that have been done seamlessly integrate with everything, Google Maps is a good example.
Being alerted when a product has an update
Changelog easily visible in marketplace
and many more..

I know Paul has a number of modules coming soon so those will be interesting to look at.

Thanks for the detailed feedback - that's awesome - I appreciate you taking the time to type all that out for us. We definitely have a lot of modules and updates that are still behind wraps at this time, but you'll see a lot more stuff coming out over the next few months. JR has a really easy to work with module structure (IMO) so it makes adding things pretty easy. Where it almost always ends up being tricky though is how "integrated" we make stuff. There's a large number of our customers that really want to be able to customize almost every aspect of JR, and then at the other end you have users that just want to enable it and have it all integrated and "just work". So the trick is trying to find the right balance between those 2 points and hopefully come up with something that for most users "just works", and for the users that want to customize everything, they can at least customize the important parts of it.

Thanks again for the feedback!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Just a thought if you guys did the integrated stuff in a high end skin, say $100, Media Pro or Pro Jam would be two very good starting points. I for one would buy it in an instance.

That way those who want to customise every aspect can choose a lesser skin without all the seamless integration stuff and those that want it can pay a little more to get it out of the box.

I understand resources are limited but feel this could be killer for quite a few people.

(PS that's a shameless plug on my part to save myself a lot of work lol)

FWIW, the new JR5 is AWESOME. Went through a few headaches of my own getting it migrated but it was worth the wait...