Evilcoder.org

Recently I bought the Marina skin for Directadmin (the management frontend for JR-Hosting), to give a more appealing interface to our users, with an easy to implement way to customize the branding a bit for our company. For two years the skin costs 15 dollars, which isn’t that much.

What do you get for it? You get a PDF file, an install script, and a .tar.gz version of the script itself. When you use the install script, you see a bunch of quickly written shell scripts or if you use the GUI, you only see the installation being done at some point.

Now the interesting part: It does not work. The framework around it installs succesfully, one of my users can see a couple of things like the file manager, but administration options are not there. I tried debugging this a bit by hand and found a few items in the shell scripts that can be improved (submitted one of the changes upstream already, which was committed, but not everywhere ). So I decided to contact support, 2 year license, 2 year support (something didn’t match because the license details tell me that I only have 1 year support?!) and got an anwer after poking a bit. I showed the steps I took and finally a few days (!) later I was asked for a screenshot. I submitted the screenshot and then… silence.

For 15Dollars you cannot expect that much, but I do expect that one at least gets a bit of help when needed. This is bad for marketing. The knowledgebase is empty, support is slacking more then I do occasionally. My idea: Just keep the standard skin for DirectAdmin, this isn’t worth the 15 dollars (yet).

Hopefully things change a bit, the skin looks really cool, but without functionality at all, you do not want to pay for it . See the screenshot for what I can see when I have installed and assigned the skin to my testuser, which happends to be an administrator.