Monday, July 16, 2007

PHP Cow: A User perspective (Highly negative experience)

I was looking to buy a news script for a client to be used as a News manager and some other content issues. Looking at the features list of phpcow and the example templates, the script looked promising.

I registered for a trial account and tried to implement a new template. A lot of inconveniences because of the image path and other limitations. However, I put an order to buy the script hoping that a fully installed script would not have all these shortcomings.

Here started my negative experience. They claim to send the license within 24 hours but it took them 72 hours to send it to me. Their after sales support is too fast to be true. It needs almost a day to answer an email. They fix the license for an absolute URL and it does now work for any directory within the licensed URL. It should be always at the root of this URL. You can not even test it on a test server.

They claim client's satisfaction but there is no refund policy even though their script is encoded and one can not use it at all without the license. Still, bad luck if you buy it.

I suggest that one asks a lot of questions before registering a sale and wish you best luck if you got into this trap also.

5 comments:

Mostafa RAMi said...

السلام عليكم
Hi,
it's always a pain to see someone go through this every web developer and designer nighmare.
what version of phpCow were you refering to? & how did you get this unfortunate incident sorted out (if ever).
best wishes.

Bilal Abdul Kader said...

وعليكم السلام
It was PHPCOW enterprise. This was last year and I forgot the version number.
The application looks nice but it is not flexible enough to be deployed freely.

The support is awful as well and I had to fight with them to change the domain registered on the license to give it to someone else who did not use it also very well.

For me, I would rather go with an open source application and customize it a bit instead of getting such a black box again.

Mostafa RAMi said...

thanks for the fast reply.

Bilal Abdul Kader said...

U R welcome anytime?
R u working in the development domain?

Bilal Abdul Kader said...

The worst with PHP Cow is that they have closed lately without closing their website.

They are still selling but the system is down and nobody can make their system work.

This is illegal in the States but who is going to convince them that business is not about making money only but about respect as well.