Any one tried Phpcow?

have anybody tried phpcow? Please share the results!

 

DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON PHPCOW!!!!


I made that mistake about 8 months ago, and wasted $450.

PHPCOW is buggy and bloated. Their patches fix one issue, and usually create 2-3 others. My error log in CPanel is constantly full of PHPCOW errors (they say thats the hosts fault). The editor has a horrible time with font tags.....(repetitive placement of tags, no tags, improper placement, non-closing tags).

As to their customer service....poor is putting it nicely. The customer service people are either bi-polar, or habitual drug users. One day their customer service guy is sweet as sugar, chatty, and very helpful...the next, not so much. Each and every problem is your fault, not PHPCOW (Interestingly, they always release a patch addressing your problems within a few days). I changed hosting companies three times based on PHPCOW always telling me it was someone elses fault as to why their program has problems....and still no difference. When you try to argue or debate the point, their customer service A. Threatens to disconnect you B. Tells you you are stupid and its not their fault C. Tells you to find another News Publishing Program D. Threatens to delete your site.......but, my all time favorite is when they tell you if you are not happy, to ask for a refund, and when you do, they tell you no....that they don't offer refunds!!!! Ah, great customer service!!!! Also, if you have problems with someone at PHPCOW, good luck getting someone else to talk to...one person handles emails, phone, and IM messages, and when you make him mad...your complaints or questions get deleted!

Save your time, sanity, and money, these people are clowns

 

To be honest, we are pretty much happy with the software and the support staff. Have been doing a research for three months before buying "Branded Version" (a well spent USD 850) of Phpcow for one of the client's (which hosts online version of a a pretty well know magazine amongst south asian diaspora) in US. They have about half a million page views now within 6 weeks of complete revamp of site and page view per visitor inreased from an average of 2.9 (pre phpcow) to 6.2 (post phpcow)

We also have provided a managed dedicated server to one company which hosts two news sites with one site having one million page views/month. Entirely from professional ethics point of view, i would not want to base my judgement about any company based on personal prejudices. To say the elast im pretty much satisfied (more than happy if i am allowed to say that) but would always prefer to base on "Quantitave Facts". Just saying so and so is a scammer would not befit my status. Yes one can express being unhappy about something.

based on just one site that we based on phpcow we have order for just doing templating from a film review site which is again based on phpcow and again a US client. I do not post links on forums but if anyone would like to know i am always available quite frequently on forums.

The only issue which could lead to a comment emnating from frustration is not being able to do html tagging properly. Those who are not aware of css or working on notepad but are more habitual of using dreamweaver or frontpage editors which are for beginers in site designing and are not willing to do it in baby steps often reach a level of frustration where undesired sweeping comments are the end result.

A company can be good or bad. A company with 500 verified paypal account holders as customers (i know this as i have paid for license thru paypal) cannot be that bad as this thread makes it out to be.

Yes in case templating has frustrated because of limitations of skill sets, we are there to help you out (at a professional cost of course).

I can only say, I am more than satisfied with phpcow and since i do not post links i have not posted links on phpcow's corporate site. Should anyone want a peek let me know and i can give you the site that i talked of. BTW, i am not an affiliate of phpcow (i don't know if they have one) ... the above is based on personal experience dealing with the company and their software for past 3 months. It was a fruitful 850 USD spent on that software

BTW, could you please post the erros that you see in cpanel logs? Perhaps i can be of some help. Yes it could be either way , either PHPCOW's fault or your templating fault. One site where we have supplied managed dedicated server to the hosting company which is hosting phpcow based news site, the loads used to kick up heavily (as the site has 1 million page views/mo) and then most of the traffic was concentrated within a 6-9 hr time window.

If it's related to host, then it's time you try and find a good host. 3$ hosting accounts are not good. If you were on VSD with servint, well servint clients were never able to run their phpcow sites. The 1 million page view site was hosted on a VDS and another VDS for another site but both of them used to spiuke up to 14+ loads. Today both sites are hosted on a single p4 3.4Gig 1258 MB RAM managed server and loads hardly go above 1.3 most of the time staying below 1. So if you were or are with servin, they do have issues unless you are a pro in server administration yourself.

Cheers
UltraDuo

 

Are you serious?

All of my problems were resolved and i'm succefully using the PHPCow for hardwarelogic.com

WYSIWYG Editor was causing most of my problems which is also fixed.

Well, I'm still happy I'm a customer of PHPcow. There is no softare with no bugs but good is when company supporting you and fixing things. We had no problem past 4 month.

 

PHPCow is an excellent platform and I highly recommend it.

 

why do you want to give your money somebody? do you have so much money? if you have so mcu, give to me

as i see it's normal cms. why do you try joomla as your cms? it has tons of extensions and a great community to support

 

I was thinking about it but I don't know anymore there are good and bad reviews. Ill try to find something else.

 

People always seem to think Joomla is the only answer.

 

I agree, phpCow is a competitive CMS.

For a brief CMS review you can read one of my previous posts here:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2825431&postcount=26

 

I had a bizarre experience with this guy recently. My take was the same as this poster, namely that the guy I was talking to was probably on some drug of some kind. I'm not trying to just be nasty here, that was entirely my impression.

What really scared me during my one week involvement with PHPCow was the total lack of online documentation. There isn't any, period! You would think a product as complex as this would have oodles, as well as an active community forum but there's nothing like that at all.

Check out the purported TV commercial spot listed on the front page. I suspect the guy is brilliant, but on crack or something similar. And that all the work he does do is on marketing not on the actual product itself.

Fortunately I was able to secure a full refund for my client by threatening to dispute the transaction. The fact that he actually did refund the money tells me he didn't want his income source advised of any problems.

 

banging my head against the wall with phpcow - cld be our fault but without a simple starter guide that makes sense its a nightmare

 

I can't say that I regret the purchase of PHPCow, but I'm starting to think about taking a different direction. Lack of documentation is really killing it for me. Little did I know that I can't edit the files in an external editor, and these templates seem slapped together.

PHPCow did what it was initially supposed to do for my website, but I'm going to have to switch to something else a little bit more flexible if I want to grow.

 

Try Vivvo CMS. Vivvo.net

 

I had similar experience with phpCOw in the beginning. It was hard to get my head around it. You are literally forced to figure out their "cow" language on your own but I do love the script and continue to use it. It does great with the SERPs and is user friendly (after you get it all setup how you like it) My biggest issue right now is that when you import RSS feeds it doesn't display images if they aren't in the description tag, and none of mine are. All images I find have a separate Image tag. So now I am attempting to find out how to write a custom code to pull only the image in a feed so I can display the images on my site. I don't know why they wouldn't have made the feeds more versatile to allow images to be displayed but I asked them and this will not be a feature addition even in the future.
They really should add a more extensive knowledge base, or add a forum so that people could see all the questions and answers in one spot and then I think they would have a better subscription to their product, but I guess thats too logically of an idea for them LOL

 

For those saying theres no documentation - I found a lot of information on their site: http://www.phpcow.com/?c=143

I'd say phpCow is a very flexible, very powerful CMS; however it could be difficult for anyone without experience of at least HTML to really get the most out of it... not so much in that you need to be able to code; moreso you need an appreciation of such things as calling functions etc.

So, its a great script - I can completely understand people struggling to get to grips with it - but if you do, then you can put together one hell of a site.

 

LOL, I didn't post this.......

I've noticed that their staff seems to spend more time going around to forums like this, posting rave reviews of their software as users than they do improving and optimizing their software.

They've replaced the guy who was a complete creep (joseph) with a guy with a slightly less abrasive attitude, who doesn't really do anything, except close your tickets after a smart assed remark.

I've switched hosting companies 4 times because they told me the hosting was the issue, yet I'm always having server load issues.......a couple weeks back, their excuse was I needed a dedicated server....and when i told them I'm paying $279 for a good dedicated server, they didn't say anything more, and closed my ticket.

The program is a resource hog, is full of errors (there a several grammatical errors within the program), it generates hundreds of errors if you check its HTML compliance, the customer service is terrible, and i honestly won't recommend it to anyone......

If any of you have questions, or want to see some of what I've dealt with the past 16 months, feel free to PM or email me, i'd be happy to show you.....as i'm sure that several questionable types will now post, refuting my claims and talking about how fantastic PHPCOW is.

 

there are plenty of specialized CMS's out there for all different categories of websites. I will probably never get another one of those "a little bit of everything" CMS's, certainly not with a price tag.

It all comes down to more time wasted hacking PHP = more money lost not being on Google

 

I've been a customer of PHPCOW for about 18 months now.....some good times, but most of the time, I'm pulling my hair out with these guys. Over the 18 months, at their request, I've switched hosting solutions 4 times........and gone from a shared server to a $279 Dedicated server, and at every stop, the hosting company points out what a resource hog PHPCOW is.

For the first year or so, the customer service guy was a freak.....seriously, one day he was nice, and helpful....the next, not so much. I can't even count how many times I would point out an issue, like HTML compliance, or editor issues, or grammar issues that I was promised would be fixed.......only to never have them addressed. Ask them too many times and you get threats about deleting you install, etc. I even told them once that would be fine, if they refunded the $445 I spent on their program.....they agreed, then at the last minute said no refund.

After being told that I was too demanding "PHPCOW is not your dog to kick when you unhappy" (Sorry, but host after hosting complaining, 300+ errors in the error log a day, and numerous other issues tend to make you unhappy). I was told that I would no longer get support, even though I had paid for it. I talked to a manager, and we came to an understanding that someone else would help me.........if only I removed my negative post here......which I didn't do.......but someone else logged into my account here and posted that all my problems were solved, and that I was happy.....a post I didn't see until I got a notification that someone had replied to my post.

I will say that lately, the service has been better, and for the most part I've been happy.....but still, when you bring up an issue, or complain about something, they fly off the handle and start in with the crappy attitudes again......I upgraded the latest patch, which destroyed my templates and took down my site......they immediately said it wasn't their fault and that I was the only one who had a problem.....until they looked at my server and realized that they needed to patch their patch because it only supported the latest Apache.

I got a nasty email from them this morning about my last post here, and again am getting the whole "You don't like our software so delete it" emails.......I would, and will, once I can afford something else. However i don't trust these people, as more than once they've threatened to delete my site/database/etc.....and swear they can do it by a simple script.......lord help you if you get on their bad side.

I don't act like an "ANGRY competitor", my staff and I are simply tired of the whole circus. I like how them fixing bugs, fixing issues, and trying to make their software less server intensive" constitutes "hours of support beyond the $445 I paid". I can't even begin to add up the hours I've spent helping them identify problems with their program......and still its a bug riddled mess as far as I'm concerned.

This is the last message I got from them, after telling them my site had better not crash, or disappear

Stay away from these people, and their software........there's a reason its gone from $445 to $100 installed over the last year......and i hope I'm not the only one who finds all their testimonials suspicious.....as almost all have the same poor grammar, and basically say the same thing......if only they spent as much time on their program as they do trolling forums talking up their software.

 

Hosts when they know nothing blame the software. We are running more than 50 licenses on one dual core server with many doing as high as 100GB/Mo traffic. We have custom built more than 10 sites on phpcow (yea 2100$+ and clients with no time to waste pay that) and not one client has been unhappy. You are lucky that they are talking to you after 18 months. There's nothing that they or any software vendor can do wrt server management. One client shifted from aplus.net to a managed dedicated with us and their server has been up and running for 4 months.

You have my AIM so can contact there when i am online. But allow me to say that you have enough free time to play this game of musical chairs.

Chill man.

HyTC

 

I guess so. Clients wouldn't have been paying from 2100 -4000$ for sites built by us and also hosted by us (shared and dedicated) and be happy if the software was as bad as you keep saying of and on.

Hit the AIM Button if I am online in case you are really serious of all that you talk. Ppl ask us to do MSN for 50$ we only say sorry. If there's no budget idea is simple don't dream. This may sound harsh but professionals know their job well. Oh and joomla .... ummm not sure how much time one would need to spend patching all declared security vulnerabilities ... we know this as we do joomla based sites also for clients on very low budget.

Cheers
HyTC