We are currently evaluating Joomla plug-ins for SEO. I installed the trial version of RSSEO on about three sites I have to say I haven't been able to get it to work. I can't get the Crawler to even show me the pages that are available for me to manage.

From a usability perspective it's difficult to determine whether or not it's working.
1) When I click on the link "Please click here first to check if your server has the necessary functions in order to run RSSeo!", I get an exclamation mark icon and a big red message that reads.
"Connection with "cURL,fsockopen,fopen,file_get_contents" successfully"

The “successfully” part makes it sound like my server will work. But the giant exclamation icon and red text look foreboding. Luckily I know enough about basic Unix commands to guess that it appears to work.

2) I understand that the features are limited but it's actually difficult to tell which ones are not available in the free version.

3) I assume that the first thing I need to do is use the Crawler to build a list of the pages I can manage. If so I will recommend moving it to be the first tab and reorder the tabs in a somewhat sequential process.

Back to my original issue of getting the Crawler to work. When I go to the crawler tab and click “initialize”, it does nothing.

When I look in the Plugins and Extensions, there's nothing installed. The Free version says it's just the component. So does anything even work in the trial version? It's just not clear.

Please advise. I'd like to get this plug-in working so we can properly evaluate it and start rolling the cost of it in every job.

Hello,

RSSeo! trial is designed to provide a look and feel of the component along with its configuration options. It does not have any functionality implemented.

alexp wrote:
Thanks for the answer but now I have to say...

Really? I'm sorry but this was not disclosed anywhere that I saw. All the documentation said was that SOME features were disabled. You wasted a lot of my time attempting to determine what features were and were not available and how well the actual features worked.

You guys need to be a lot clearer on your communication. You may make good Joomla components but your clarity needs some improvement.

Thanks again for the answer.

...this is stated on the tryout download page:

http://www.rsjoomla.com/resources/free-downloads.html

alexp wrote:
That link doesn't work. And besides... It didn't say then when I downloaded it or you didn't make it clear enough.

Besides... who provides a "Look and feel" demo for software. The interface is only half the evaluation criteria. If I can't evaluate the functionality then I still don't know what I'm buying. There's lots of slick looking things out there that don't work worth a crap (i.e. Windows Vista).

alexp wrote:
I should clarify. You may have provided me the URL but the actual link as listed in your forum post does not work. It returns a 404 page.

you can try again now.