pMachine was recommended to me, so I decided to check it out.
I’m going to keep this review short.
The feature set is INCREDIBLE. It does a million, billion, jillion different things. All optional. All customizable. All very well thought out.
Sounds great, huh?
There’s a catch. Many of their features are over-loaded (used in ways they weren’t intended to be used originally) in order to make up for the fact that, even though they claim pMachine supports templates, really it just supports embeddable chunks of HTML that you embed yourself using their PHP functions, meaning you actually have to write PHP pages in order to use the features.
I know PHP. This is EASY for me. I still refuse to do it because it shouldn’t be that way.
Here is a quotation from their documentation to show you what I mean:
MEMBER NAV BAR
<?php member_login_navbar(); ?>Displays the member navigation bar (login, logout, members, profile, register and calendar).
In the control panel, you’ll find two templates that define the look of these links: pMachine displays one template if a member is logged-in, the other if a member is logged-out.
You don’t have to use the “nav bar” look if you don’t want to. You can even loose the concept completely and just put “static” links to the various pages on your site. You can also get creative and put a lot more than just the nav bar in the two templates: perhaps two versions of the entire header to your site, which changes depending on whether someone is logged in or not.
That is just ridiculous.