It’s a new year with a lot of opportunity to get on the right foot. As a Joomla! user you some times get overwhelmed with all the extensions available on the market today. On the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) there are 10,168 available extensions to sift through. So, the question is how do you figure out what Joomla Extensions are right for your site. In this post we will only cover what we at ‘corePHP’ use in our development services for the websites we develop.
WordPress for Joomla – Blogging for Joomla
This is the one of the hottest blogging platforms for Joomla!. We took the most popular blogging software on the market today and integrated it into Joomla!. Lets take a look at some of the great advantages of WordPress for Joomla!:
- Access to thousands of plugins available in WordPress.
- Enhanced SEO.
- Easy and straight forward blogging.
- Out of the box content versioning.
- and much more. Visit here to see all the advantages.
This component is a must have and we install it for all of our blogging sites.
sh404SEF – Search Engine Friendly URLs
Joomla! is known for spitting out some ugly URLs. In the latest version of Joomla they have cleaned this up. Although it still doesn’t do half of what sh404SEF does. This is a standard install for any Joomla! site that we develop. You can use it regardless of the size of your site!
- Remove duplicate URLs, a common problem with Joomla web sites.
- Automatically generate tiny URLs for your content in the Joomla administrative backend. This is huge for those that are trying to market a page but you do not need a massive URL to share in print.
- Satisfy many of the Google recommendations for search engine optimization with just a few clicks.
- Read more.
Akeeba Backup
Backups are extremely important and most of the time forgotten about. Many of our clients reach out to us and tell us their site is down due to either a hack or server issue. First thing we do is ask for their backups. 9 out of 10 times the answer is “I don’t have backups”. Either the server company does not offer a backup or the backup somehow magically got lost. To help prevent these headaches it is recommended to do off site backups. This is a great tool to download a backup of your site to your computer. Lets look at some awesome features:
- Migrate. Move. Duplicate. Are you a web developer and need to do some of these task. Akeeba will make this less time consuming so you can focus on the more important stuff and that is building the site and enhancing it per the clients needs.
- One Click. Akeeba makes it so easy to work. All you need to do is click a button and the system will do the rest.
- Ability to copy to the cloud. If your server goes down FOREVER with this feature you have the ability to pull a backup from Amazon S3, Dropbox and more.
JCE – Joomla Content Editor
This is installed for all the sites we develop. There are other editors for specific reasons but 90% of the time we are using JCE and love it. The content thru out a site is created with a WYSIWYG editor, which stands for “what you see is what you get.” Essentially this means all formatting is visible on the fly, without having to directly interact with HTML elements (although this option is available if your administrators desire). Add a set of tools to your Joomla! environment that gives you the power to create the kind of content you want, without limitations, and without needing to know or learn HTML, XHTML, CSS or any additional coding knowledge
- JCE has an amazing File Manager. This makes inserting images, PDFs and more easier to manage and insert into your content
- Use JCE Media Manager – Here you can upload media files (flash, windows media, QuickTime etc), embed YouTube, and create popups to any media type Super flexibly
- Create Captions – Some images need those additional touches with captions. You can create the captions around images with control over the caption container and text styling
Xmap – Site map generator
A powerful site map generator that creates a site map of your site using the structure of your menus. Not only does Xmap generate a map for your users it also dynamically generates a XML sitemap that can be submitted to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Advanced Module Manager – Making Joomla work like a breeze
Advanced Module Manager changes the way you manage your Joomla modules forever. Here is a glimpse of some crazy awesome features:
- See what modules are active for the menu item you are editing
- Edit modules in modal popup windows
- Option to not show modules that have no output (handy for things like dynamic menus)
- Option to show modules on all pages, except the selected menu items (reverse functionality of normal selection)
This is also a standard install for all sites we work on. The team at NoNumber do an amazing job!!!
jomSocial – Bringing social to Joomla!
jomSocial is the elite component to add a powerful yet simple community to your Joomla site. With this component you can easily turn your Joomla CMS into a full-fledged social networking site. Many communities today have used jomSocial to share their brands, their likes about a hobby, and so much more. Bring your community together today and share your likes/dislikes. jomSocial is packed with ton of features:
- Streams are highly interactive with like or comment system
- Robust filter options
- Fun to use photo gallery
- Same with the video gallery. Super fun to share
- Tons of integrations
- Privacy control and so much more
Kunena
When it comes to adding forums to your site there is only one elite product that comes to mind and that is Kunena forums. This platform is just amazing and easy to use. Everything is pretty much configured right out of the box once installed on your site. Just assign the menu and you are ready to go. I do not believe there is a way to make this component easier to use then the way they currently have it. A must to have a forum on your site.
K2
K2 adds the missing feature in Joomla! A complete CCK system that just as expandable as your mind can make it. This system will save administrators management time from managing a dozen extensions to do what one extension does. K2 brings together 4 key elements:
- feature-rich content in Joomla – Bringing content to new levels that was not there before. Easy to add pictures and videos and extra fields
- ease of use
- flexible templates – This is huge for big sites. When you need to use a template for a certain area no need to mess with code
- performance – fast and efficient.
Scribe SEO
Scribe is a content marketing software that ingrates with your Joomla site with this plugin developed by Joomlashowroom. This is another great SEO component that empowers you to have smarter content when creating it giving you more social sharing and higher search rankings then you would have just trying to do it on your own.
With these amazing tools above I feel you have a great start to the new year and a new site. Good speed!
Michael Pignataro
VP of Operations
