Plugin Name: Snowfall Effect

Publisher: Purusothaman

Review Type: In depth.

Usability: 9/10 - Nice looking admin interface, easy to understand and easy to use. Not really too much to say about this plugin's usability right now but I would have loved to see customize-able "snow flakes." I understand that the flakes are text and now images and that would open up even bigger opportunities for ALT-Codes or pieces of text.

Features: 8/10: It does what it says it does and that's that. Like I said I would have liked to see customize-able "flakes" that can be replaced with other strings.

Graphics: 10/10 - Can't complain about the graphics as there are none. The colorizing is the only thing that added to the final score. It's one of the more useful features of the plugin and would be even more useful if you could customize the item that's falling.

Spelling and grammar: 10/10 - Perfect! No spelling or grammar errors to be found throughout the plugin. 

Code Review: 9/10 - The usual standard for any of Puru's plugins! Simply amazing. I would have (as usual) liked to have seen commented code, but that is hardly a problem.

Final Rating: 8/10 - The plugin has room for improvement but is okay as it is now. As suggested I would have loved to have seen customize-able strings falling, but that is hardly a problem seeing as it is a "Snowfall effect." 

Plugin Name: Attachments.

Publisher: Sergey Kambalin

Review Type: In depth.

Usability: 10/10 - Not once in the whole time I've been on Oxwall, even before I started doing reviews have I found such a useful plugin! I have to say that Sergey has out done himself to the full extent this time! I would recommend this plugin to any major Oxwall site as a complete must-have!

Features: 10/10 - It does everything it says and more. The detail on this plugin is so fine that you can even set the name of the photo album posted photos go into! I mean how insane is that? I think that this plugin should be much, much more popular than it currently is! 

Graphics: 10/10 - Has the ability to make any Oxwall post look exceptional. Not too much to say about the graphics on this plugin. They're perfect and that's that.

Spelling and grammar: 10/10 - No spelling errors as far as I can see. Also comes with a fully editable language file that can change every string in the entire plugin. Useful.

Code Review: 9.5/10 - Near damn perfect! As usual the only problem is the fact it is uncommented but the code is generally simple enough for the users to understand.

Final Rating: 10/10 - No needed improvement! Overall I had to give this plugin a 10/10 for all the hard work and features that went into it. Despite the code only getting a 9.5 for lack of commenting - I added a 0.5 because of how easy the plugin developer is to communicate with! Service is perfect, plugin is perfect and the code is near perfect. Very please with this plugin and with Sergey for letting me borrow it to test out!

A plugin that is an absolute MUST-HAVE for any Oxwall based website! This is the kind of thing I would like to see included with the newer Oxwall distributions!

A special thanks to Sergey Kambalin for lending me the plugin to test out!

But, if you are the team and claim to provide any kind of professional trusted review service, then the following bullets are minimum and required to provide a valued and trusted by both sides (users/developers) service:

- to have as more objective point of view as possible;

- to have a good skills with an user's experience and product design;

- to have a good programming skills and the real experience with code modification for Oxwall;

- to follow the license policy of any content for review;

Otherwise, nobody will believe it. 

Personally, I dont' sure is there a critical demand for such services in the Store now. Because:

- users are able to communicate with developers directly and provide a personal feedback in public/private;

- the most developers in the Store are very responsible and seek to follow the common product style guide;

- each new item in the Store is reviewed by moderation team i.e. original developers. And they catch dozens basic errors and interfaces' glitches. 

I must say that when I decided to start reviewing plugin in this manner I did take into consideration the fact that all of the plugins are reviewed by the moderators and by the original developers...and that there was no critical need for a service like this.

What stopped that from preventing this topic from happening was the fact that most developers like constructive criticism and might want a place to request that someone reviews their plugin in a professional manner.

I understand that I hardly have developers running at me right now, but I'm hoping to slowly gain a name for myself by doing 1 or 2 simple reviews a week.

I don't want to replace the Oxwall store's review feature, in fact I actually post the review using that as well.

I do however appreciate your criticism on this idea and will take a lot of that to heart for the betterment of the community.

EDIT: We are now at 1000+ views! A special thanks to all of the devs here at Oxwall that made it possible! Plugin devs and the like. Thanks for the support, we hope this is only the beginning!

Plugin Name: Google Maps Location

Publisher: JK

Review Type: In depth.

Usability: 9/10 - The user interface is beautiful! A genuine life saver is the fact that the users are auto-suggested area names while their typing. Along with this all then comes the smaller but sleek, sexy details that make up quite a high percentage of this plugin's rating. For instance - the profile picture and link to the users profile on the map along with the shadow cast by the text box this is stored in.

Only problems I found with this plugin were that the Auto area suggesting is a bit slow and you some times have to wait a few seconds before it will pop up with new suggestions and if the user's profile details are in tabbed view and the tabs are not big enough - you only see the corner of the map. As much as I would love to see these bugs fixed, I don't think the plugin actually requires them.

Graphics: 10/10 - Stunning. As stated earlier; the little features make a HUGE difference to this rating. Things like the shadow of the text box and the small box around the users profile picture make this plugin as beautiful as I had hoped.

Spelling and grammar: 10/10 - No spelling mistakes or grammatical errors whatsoever. In fact I could actually say that the spelling is exceptional in some places.

Code Review: 10/10 - I'm shocked to say the least! This is the first plugin I have reviewed that actually has commented code the whole way through! Easy to understand and easy to make changes where needed. I would recommend you bare this piece of info in mind before leaving your own reviews of the plugin.

Final Rating: 10/10 - A tiny...tiny bit of room for improvement on the aforementioned tab glitch in the user profile, but that is hardly going to end up crippling my view on this plugin. The plugin is a 10/10 and it completely deserves to be. For ZK's first plugin on the store I would say that this is a perfect example of what other developers should be looking at when coding their own plugins.

- Tuesday the 20th of February 2013 at 04:43PM:

A special thanks to JK for sponsoring this review with a copy of his plugin!

- Tuesday the 20th of February 2013 at 11:26PM:

An even bigger thanks to JK for getting this topic to 1500+ Views! Thanks so much for this support guys, it really does make us want to review more & more for you guys!

- Wednesday the 21st of February 2013 at 10:04AM:

Yet another thanks to JK for getting this topic to 2000+ Views!

This is a huge milestone for us, guys! We never expected it to be so popular.

I would like to send out a special thanks to all the devs who donated their plugins for reviewing along with the Mods for allowing me to do what I do without any complaints.

We will be doing a special review for our 2000th viewer milestone, so keep your eyes peeled!

Quote from Den It's always a good idea to share a personal experience with any plugin/theme with the community. 

But, if you are the team and claim to provide any kind of professional trusted review service, then the following bullets are minimum and required to provide a valued and trusted by both sides (users/developers) service:

- to have as more objective point of view as possible;

- to have a good skills with an user's experience and product design;

- to have a good programming skills and the real experience with code modification for Oxwall;

- to follow the license policy of any content for review;

Otherwise, nobody will believe it. 

Personally, I dont' sure is there a critical demand for such services in the Store now. Because:

- users are able to communicate with developers directly and provide a personal feedback in public/private;

- the most developers in the Store are very responsible and seek to follow the common product style guide;

- each new item in the Store is reviewed by moderation team i.e. original developers. And they catch dozens basic errors and interfaces' glitches. 

I'm not entirely sure what is causing that error? Is it a plugin I've reviewed or do you just need help?

-The Exaspian Studios Team

We will have a new review coming out soon, in the mean time why don't you check out how to vote for a plugin you want reviewing? More info on the first post.

I will add the following 2 categories to the In-Depth review:

File size: 
Code efficiency.

Code efficiency is basically what kind of effect the plugin is going to have on Oxwall itself.

I.E: Adding a new icon to the "Add New" bar or adding a link to the navigation. Generally stuff like that, but also I will review the code and search for things that would have a negative effect on your site.

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, we've been busy working on the CreditsFree plugin and many other little surprises for you all.

This morning Sergey Kamballin wrote to us requesting a plugin review and after a quick conversation we decided we were going to review a few of his plugins!

What plugins exactly?

User Carousel,

Extended Questions,

Profile Cover and

Group Cover.

These are listed in the order they will be reviewed.

A special thanks to Sergey Kamballin for his interest in our reviews! Check him out here.

-The Exaspian Studios Team

Plugin Name: User Carousel.

Publisher: Sergey Kambalin

Customisation: 9/10 - Unexpectedly, this was actually surprisingly customisable! When I install any plugin the first thing that I worry about is customisation. Not so much on the users party as on the admins part. The main reason I worry about this is because most Oxwall users want to feel a bit more in control of their network rather than being spoon-fed code and un-editable plugins. This plug does an amazing job of making the user feel in control of how it is going to work, the only thing I would add would be the ability to change the glow colour and the speed at which the images scroll if the autoplay option is ticked.

Usability: 8.5/10 - On the user side of things the usability is perfect! Looks great, functions as it's supposed to and gets the job done in a classy, stylish manor. However on the admin side of things it is not quite the same thing. Don't get me wrong, the plugin is easy to work with and customisable to great lengths, but the main problem I seem to find is that the carousel can only be placed on the home page. This is not a difficult feature to add in to the plugin and would definitely be worth 1.5 extra points, in my opinion.

Graphics: 9.8/10 - Splendid! I love the small details in the graphics such as the glow around the users pictures. As I stated earlier on I would have loved to have seen this glow be editable, but that's hardly a problem. What actually caused this to be a 9.8 rather than a 10 is the lack of anti-aliasing on the outline around each picture. This is easily fixable but either: changing the colour of the outline to the same colour as the glow, or anti-aliasing the outline a tiny bit more. All in all this is an easily fixable issue from both the coders side and the users side.

Spelling and grammar: 10/10 - No grammatical/spelling errors what so ever; admin side or user side.

Code Review: 9.9/10 - The code itself is of excellent quality, easily understandable and well laid out.

There is some pretty advanced stuff that goes on which I would have liked to have seen commented a bit more, but then again most of the people who are going to be looking at the source won't be needing comments in the first place.

Final Rating: 9.5/10 - A very small amount of room for improvement but can be easily added by hand.

I would say that the plugin itself is hardly a required plugin for a simple social network site, but it will definitely benefit anyone trying to break out of a tight-knit community and get users talking to each other.

Further more it does it in a very sneaky, sexy way.

Publisher: Sergey Kambalin

Customisation: 10/10 - Allows full control of what users can do while using/abusing this plugin.

Some of the available options copied out of the plugin's settings area:

Enable "Ask Users/Friends" - Allow users to share questions to other users.

Enable attachments - Allow users to add photo video or external link to a question.

Enable follow - Allow users to follow questions.

Usability: 9/10 - The user interface is pretty much the same as the Non-Extended version while posting a question. However, viewing a question is a very different thing indeed! It shows how many users have voted, the original poster and much, much more. It integrated in with the "Pimp My Profile" Plugin By Paul Cuffe and even managed to scale the pop-up size accordingly. I noticed a very cool feature in which it auto-capitalises the first letter of each available answer, which is useful for people with bad grammar (Most of the users on most of the social networks I've seen so far!).

I would have liked to have seen Radio Button questions where the users can only answer 1 of the options, but that is hardly a requirement.

Graphics: 9.9/10 - A surprisingly sexy layout and user interface, although at times I feel as if the pop-up version of a question does look a little over crowded.

Spelling and grammar: 10/10 - No grammatical/spelling errors what so ever; admin side or user side. In fact it even corrects your grammar automatically!

Code Review: 9.9/10 - Same goes for this plugin; "The code itself is of excellent quality, easily understandable and well laid out.

There is some pretty advanced stuff that goes on which I would have liked to have seen commented a bit more, but then again most of the people who are going to be looking at the source won't be needing comments in the first place."

Final Rating: 9.8/10 - A must have for any Oxwall website! Tiny bit of room for improvement but nothing insanely needed! I would recommend this plugin to any Oxwall site that needs a bit of "va-va-voom" to get the users a bit more active and exited. I, myself am actually considering purchasing this plugin to use on my own site!