Associate-O-MaticReviews 3

I have several assocaite-omatic stores that I was able to set up within minutes. I never had any problem with ioncube. I think if people do experience difficulty with that, it's a server issue, since some hosts don't support IC.

At any rate, I was able to set up a store pretty quickly, and then spent several days working on colours, a header graphic, etc. I know you can get premade templates for it, but I was happy enough with the way I did it. I have some PHP experience, so I could always go into the template files if I wanted to do some serious tweaks. I think most people would rather go the easy route like I did.

I have made sales on my sites, so it's working fine for me. I guess I could promote my stores a little more and drive more traffic, but considering the amount of effort I've put in so far, I have to say that I'm quite pleased.

"F-Worthless" is probably overly harsh but since I can not install this to try it out at all I have no basis for anything higher.

I was interested in trying this out. First of all I had to install ioncube which encodes the programming to keep it secret. This ultimately went ok but it does require full su/admin privileges on the server plus relatively detailed knowledge of your server. Then I got a blank white screen. According to their forums this happens quite a bit, but there is no solution there.

So I opened a support ticket. I had to turn on php error logging in the config files and locate the log, again this requires significant server experience although it's not hard if you have that background. It turns out that the ioncube encoding is done in php5 and therefore the unencoding must be. So whether or not the program itself works in php4 is irrelevant, it can't be decoded. The support ticket ground to a halt at that point, a few weeks ago. So apparently they are not interested in maintaining php4 compatibility.

In an ideal world I'd just update php. But I've run the server for a long time and there are many scripts on it that run fine that would break and the effort required to update and recode all of that would not be worthwhile.

The aomtalk pages have "Requirements" parts 1 and 2 that are somewhat defensive in response to people finding that they needed more than they thought to set this up. It's true, strictly speaking, that there is not any database and you can't deal with any programming anyway since it's encoded. However, a significant background in running a server and installing utilities like ioncode may be required. The fact that they had to respond with these two articles, somewhat defensive in nature, indicates that this is not uncommon.

If you have a host with php5 and ioncube ready to go you may be all set. Otherwise expect some significant server administration skills to be required. In 15+ years this is the first time I've heard of ioncube, let alone needed it. It's also the first time I had to just give up on installing a script.