As amazing as Joomla is on its own, once it's up and running for you, there are a seemingly endless amount of extensions made to work with Joomla. These extensions can provide you with a fully functioning online store (VirtueMart), a forum message board (Fireboard), an AJAX image-rotator for your site's header or an online community building application (Community Builder). All of these integrate with Joomla, and were designed specifically for Joomla. Best of all, the majority of these extensions, like Joomla itself, are open-source. The best place to find Joomla Extensions and read user reviews and ratings is http://extensions.joomla.org/
One of the areas Joomla 1.5 improved over the 1.0.x code-based was how it handled the installation of extensions. Before, you had to know if you were installing a Module, Mambot, or Component and installing a Template was a completely different process. Now, all of this has been consolidated under the new Extensions menu.
Once you have found an extension you'd like to download, simply click the Extensions menu and select Install/Uninstall. On the resulting screen, which will be the Install tab, you only need to browse to the ZIP file that contains the extension and upload—Joomla does the rest. If you have already uploaded the file or you have a URL to it, Joomla can also fetch it that way as well.
If the module was installed successfully, you will see a screen from Joomla saying so. If there was a problem, you will see a similar screen explaining the problem. Once the module's installed, you only need to follow the instructions provided with the extension to enable and use it.
Because many of these extensions are open-source and created by developers in their spare time, do not get frustrated if you find nuances or bugs. In most cases, the developer is more than happy to work with you to ensure their extension is functioning properly. That being said, there are a few recommendations we have for locating extensions:
Ratings, Reviews, and Updates: read reviews, check the rating the other users give it, and see how recently it has been updated. Sometimes, an extension will have been posted by a developer and then left un-updated for months.
Native Joomla Support: Joomla has the ability to run some of the older extensions in a compatibility mode. Our recommendation is to avoid that and only install extensions that have native support for the version of Joomla you are using.
Professional: this is more subjective, but if you take 10 or 15 minutes to check out the developer's website, you will get an idea of how professional the extension is—does it look like it was created by a person or group who allocates time to build a solid and professional product. Gravitate toward these developers if you can.
In the end, just think smart and rely on the community around Joomla to help you pick the right components for your needs. Don't overthink it, but at the same time do spend some time making sure your selections are wise.
Although we are not going to be able to cover each of these in this book, we have included the following table to outline some of our favorite Joomla Extensions.
Name | URL | Description |
|---|---|---|
VirtueMart | Entire eCommerce platform—shopping cart, payment gateways, inventory management. | |
DOCman | Document Management system—great for sharing documents and files with users. | |
Community Builder | Can be used to create online communities. | |
JCE | WYSIWYG editor that is based on, but more powerful than the TinyMCE implementation shipped with Joomla. | |
Hot Property | Real estate management system. | |
sh404SEF | SEO control over your URL rewriting, titles, meta data, and more! | |
AEC | Allows you to create subscriptions to govern your users' access to your site. Allows you to charge access and assign membership levels. | |
Joom!Fish | Multilingual content manager, which allows you to support multiple languages on your site. | |
JEvents | Need a calendar on your site that displays events? This is the solution for you. | |
Joomap | Creates sitemaps for users to use as well as to submit to Google for SEO purposes. |