That Net Site

I am not against anyone making money from their great work and the developers of SobiPro are no exception.  However I do believe that if you are providing a solution that is supposedly for free that it comes with some basic documentation on how to use the product.  However to access this basic documentation a ‘club’ membership is required which I feel is wrong, but that is only my view, yours may be different.  During my use of SobiPro I have been compiling a list of how to references on using the SobiPro Template framework and the template language (XSL) used.

UPDATE: Yesterday I decided to trial a Club Membership and bought a 1 month membership to see what the documentation was like, and to be honest I was pleasantly surprised and really do believe that a 1 or 3 month membership is worth it as the documentation is very good.  It fills the gap between what I already knew and what I have been trying to work out.  So if you can afford a single months membership I suggest you get it, or better yet a 3 month membership.  The only thing that they need to consider adding is an upgrade path from a Bronze to Silver to Gold which I think will assure ongoing payments by users as they notice the true value of the documentation. 

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I am not usually one to overly praise a template design but I must make a note of this one as in my view it is the most simple, visually nice and best administration template I have ever used since using Joomla (since it split from Mambo).  Mission Control by Rocket Theme is an elegant administration template that is very well layed out, easy to identify where each part of the admin side of Joomla is and far better for the novice user of any Joomla web site.  It is now my default Administration template for all Joomla sites I have, use and develop.

While the default and standard administration template for Joomla is fine it is more targetted towards a user that really knows Joomla, which for me is fine but for many others it can be daunting and even a little scary to use (based on comments from non Joomla users).  I have tried many other administration templates, including the Adminpraise templates which are quite good as well, however the Mission Control template is less cluttered, better layed out and just easier to use for the novice to even the most expert Joomla user.

I need to make a note I have been a great fan of Rocket Theme templates for quite some time, having a full paid membership with them for about 4 years, however I dropped membership earlier this year simply because they now solely use the Gantry system, which I personally don’t like.  That is not to say the system is not good it just means itis not good for me personally.  I prefer to have control of the framework myself.

The Mission Control template is absolutely 100% free and is available for both Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6, hopefully they will continue to maintain it for the upcoming Joomla 1.7 and then 1.8, which I am sure they will.

Instead of me showing every aspect of the theme I think it is best for you to get it and install it yourself, try it out and I am sure you too will think that this is one of, if not the best admin template for Joomla so far.

Rocket Theme – Mission Control Administration template