It is unfortunatelly quite a sad review I have to write. Nevertheless I hope other users will find the pros and cons helpful while figuring out whether or not Ohanah suits their needs. Though a warning must go first: The company Beyounic SA who is behind Ohanah is very dangerous for people who make a living from setting up Joomla websites for clients. They dont care about their customers who trusted them by purchasing their support and if they dont like the way a customer questions their product, they turn ruthless and irresponsible. They cut customers off from the forum and deny any communication even when you are in the middle of a project. They dont care about the time you took to write many bug reports and feature suggestions. This company nicks a lot of your time.



Pros:

- installs fine

- the extension does not require url_fopen

- the front end look and feel out of the box is pretty good

- as long as one doesn't change anything it works more or less

- after getting familar with the unconventional back end it is easy to handle since there are not many features to manage

- support is quick, although not always helpful

- one gets a refund easily when asking a bit deeper about some major issues the software has, but that does not bring back the lost time



Cons:

- the front end look and feel can not be changed easily and sometimes not at all since things like " | @" are hard coded into the core files without any surrounding elements so one can not even hide it with e.g. display:none, not to mention changig colour or font-size

- they even use line breaks for design purposes which is at first an embarressing rookie mistake and secondly requires the designer to fiddle around with negative margins, only chance to get around this in a decent way is to code template overrides - how many Joomla users have skills to do that? but at least it is possible

- no front end editing

- right now it does not work with https (hopefully they applied my fix in the next version)

- front and back end are very very buggy with the German language installed

- prior to purchase I aksed explicitly for a German translation, they said it is there but forgot to mention that the translation is incomplete and the backend falls apart

- its quite expensive for the features it offers compared to the freely available event managers

- it is in a late alpha status with not too small bugs but their marketing slogan states "bleeding edge" code ...

- Ohanah is an event registration extension hence obviously requires the website visitors to login which involves on many websites a SSL connection. But the "bleeding edge" coders simply forgot to test the extension with https ... at least the supprt can tell the customer where to digg into the core files of this extension to correct this bug

- the support forum is closed for non customers, one can not read the complaints of their customers prior to purchase

- instead of solving bugs the support reminds customers to stay calm and friendly, IMHO it is already very rude to take money for alpha versions

- customers are abused as testers

- right now it does not work with the Joomla standard editor CodeMirror

- the front end does not really adopt the template style, needs a fair amount of tweaking to blend in nicely

- the backend is utterly counter intitive

- emails to website customers are allways send in html mode, no option to send plain text

- no html editor for the html emails available, so you need to write html code into the email templates

- the backend does not use the Joomla controls and buttons which is very confusing and bad for usability

- the skills of the programmers are a bit dubious since they haven't got a clue what e.g. a "protocol independend link" is, I as a designer had to teach them how to solve their https bug with that

- the "feature request" section of their forum has more threads than the sections regarding other stuff ...

- they dont care about privacy, you can not have a nick name in the forum

- many HTML errors in front end and back end, even their own public demo throws 171 errors (in firebug)

- it is built on top of the nooku framework, which at first I thought is a good thing but now obviously isn't and maybe that is the reason for the buggy status



I din't expect Ohanah to be bugfree but I found around twenty bugs within two days past installation. After a while I just couldn't afford to spend more time on bug reports than actually getting my customers project to work. But do not expect any appology for the countless bugs you have to solve in that paid extension. They take your suggestions and time for granted and still cancel your account when ever they feel it suits them. And one more hint: Do not question their business practice or rise your tone to express your disappointment. They simply close your account with no announcement and your stuck in the middle of your project. It happend to me despite I never used any offensive language although direct wording and now Im in the Ohanah trap. I lost a good amount of reputation since my client trused me when recommending Ohanah for his website. Luckily this specific clint of mine is a tecky and after a look at the code he agreed to take Ohanah off in favour of a decently coded extension.



This experience brings the idea to one's mind that companies who offer commercial extensions should go through a certification process to protect Joomla users from wasting time and money. Unfortunately this is probably not manageable.

After testing all components for events I can assure you this is the best without question. Simple to use, elegant, professional and really great support. One of the best components I've tried Joomla in all areas.



Very good job guys!

I have to agree with a lot of the other comments. Ohanah is probably going to be the best event management extension for Joomla but at the moment, it is still under development.



Since the support is better than you can probably imagine, I would still recommend using Ohanah and if you run into troubles, ask the support.

My questions / error reports have been answered and even fixes within 24 hours.



Therefore, I still rate Ohanah as excellent, although there are some todos for the Ohanah team.

I've been using Ohanah for a while now, and I must say; with each new version I'm more impressed. Its very simple to use, extremely fast, and looks great. This is definitely the best (and prettiest) events component out there - well worth the money!

4/5 stars because of some missing features (e.g. linking to comprofiler).



Ohanah is very easy to use. The submission of events is easy and straigtforward. My client immediatly fell in love with the clean and short form for adding events at the frontend.



There are some whishes I have, most of them are allready asked for in the support section and scheduled by the team.



Support is excellent! I have had five questions, which were all answered within 24 hours. The one thing I wanted to have modified and was not supported by the team was fixed within a couple of hours, due to the clear code.

I bought this extension for use on the site of a photo club that have different events for their members, but also events that are open for everybody.

Ohanah is unfortunately not meeting all my needs at the moment, but the developer is releasing frequent updates with new features implemented.

In the support section you are allowed to suggest new features and vote for those you wan't implemented. This is nice, but I feel that maybe the product has been released a little bit early.

All in all, I am satisfied with the product and very satisfied with the support and response time of the developer.

I recommend this extension for it's clean and nice user interface and the support of the developer. But be sure to check the feature list before buying so you won't be disappointed.

This is the best agenda component for Joomla. I used it on several website now and can recommend it to anyone who wants a advanced agenda module! Its also easy to modify with some knowledge of html and css.



The support is also quick and great, so yes:

a big five stars for this great component!

Good extension.

Easy to use Ohanah and excellent support.

:-)

Ohanah is realy THE ONE extension when managing site that includes events.

It's really easy to use and it integrates great with your template. Everything works great.

Had some problems (my fault) and guys rescued me within some hours.



Keep up the good work.

I paid for this extension about 8 months ago. It became pretty clear that the extension was not upto scratch right off the bat as it was missing many basic features. Support kept saying that these features would be fixed in their new version that they were developing. Many of us put our projects on hold to wait for the new version to come out. When it did finally come out we all get an e-mail saying it's going to cost us. This after a lot of us spent so much time helping the support know what was lacking in the first version. I spent countless hours contributing and this is the slap in the face I got. Stay away from ohanah as all they care about is money. Sure they can fix fundamental flaws in their product but it's going to cost you! I recommend maybe waiting 5 years or so when they have ironed out all its flaws, then pay the money.