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My 15 Best Joomla Extensions |
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Sunday, 17 June 2007 |
A list of my favorite Joomla extensions time and time again.
For the sake of being fair to all people that don't have money, I have tried to stick to only free Joomla components, modules, and mambots here. I will however include some commercial Joomla extensions if I think they are more than justified of their cost and leave the free ones in the dust.
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Everything below is in no particular order.
15. Acajoom News - Excellent newsletter component for easily collecting visitor emails to send them information, deals, or other SPAM! Regardless, it looks great, can handle multiple newsletters, and allows you to customize your newsletter template. This component sometimes clashes with others and may be tricky to setup but a large user-base on the forums can help you get around that.
14. DOCMan - The best file-management system to use for Joomla. Many permissions and feature settings to choose from. It's the de-facto standard for many Joomla sites and it's because it's powerful. I used this on a website for a printing company so customers could upload their files to print. It worked GREAT!
13. AJAX Header Rotator - What website is complete without a rotating header! This is one is easy to use and looks great.
12. JoomlaCloner - ALWAYS backup your work! You never know when something could go wrong. I was surprised one day when I got into a fight with my webhoster (Dreamhost) and found that they shut down all 4 of my websites hosted on their servers and refused to let me retrieve my information. Lesson learned, always back up! This program has the best support, most features, and is easier to use than all the rest. I still like to backup things manually through FTP and phpMyAdmin but this is still good for someone who doesn't want to do that.
11. joomlaXplorer - Not to be mistaken for JXplorer, this is an awesome component for file management on your FTP server from Joomla. It can bypass certain bug issues where files can't be overwritten and is also very easy to use.
10. Virtuemart - Free, full-featured, and powerful. This shopping kicks butt all without charging a penny. The true value of the component is that it's so popular, it has a giant user-base complete with custom coders that share their knowledge to help you customize and tweak this thing to your liking.
9. Gmaps - Awesome component and mambot that I use to put Google-generated maps and driving instructions and markers onto websites that I do for local businesses! Again, it's easy to use and works great!
8. perForms - A great component for creating forms with all sorts of options for your vistor to enter information. I know ChronoForms is good too but I just couldn't figure out how to use it. In terms of features and ease-of-use. perForms wins easily in my book.
7. MetaTag Generator - You need this for easy SEO. I would have ranked this thing higher if only it was a little bit smarter. It still picks too many wrong words but nonetheless it allows you to easily manually edit 50 things all at once. For those that don't have time. This metatag generator works wonders.
6. rss Factory - Great way to display RSS feeds in a module or your content. It got powerful features allowing you to customize the way the feed is displayed to your website visitors. KL_RSSFEED comes in a close 2nd in this category.
5. Social Bookmarker Bot - Another big essential to improve your website's exposure and SEO rankings. No joomla blog should be without this!
4. JoomlaFCK - A great WYSIWYG editor that works better than the standard joomla one and has more options and features. I actually stumbled upon this when my default joomla editor started getting buggy and I had to find something that worked. This one works well and makes html editing as well as adding other code easier!
3. FireBoard Forum - Awesome easy-to-use forum that's great for any site. Quickly bring your website community together with this working component and configure to however you want. There's tons of options for different themes, functions, and customization.
2. Jomcomment - Still the best full-featured, easy-to-use, working comment mambot available in my opinion.
1. OpenSEF - SEF friendly URL's done correctly. It has a ton of customizable options and allows you to customize every URL to whatever you want. This thing is also pretty fast and not TOO hard to setup. This component alone will help your SEO rankings by a ton as well as making your site URL's appear more friendly to the eyes.
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