I have recently installed Joomla onto one of my sites in hopes that I can revamp and be more successful with it from a different angle. I have never messed with Joomla before so I was wondering if I could get some help on the whole "must have" joomla extensions...In your opinion which are the best ones and what are some that you use that are hard to find?
For a community site - Community Builder, hands down, is THE single most important extension. As far as others, that depends upon what you're trying to do, and who your target member is. I've literally used or demo'd dozens of extensions, and even coded a few. A little more information, please, and perhaps I can be more helpful.
Well right now its just a site that is going to link all of my blogs together...is there an extension for like an RSS feed or something...what I would really like to do is have it to where whenever one of my blogs is updated it updates on this site as well... As far as more information goes, I guess my target member is anyone who watches movies and blogs online and likes music...I have 17 blogs with different niches
The best ones are Community Builder,JCE,Joomla Explorer,Virtue mart and my favourite ARTO JOOM SEF. Since im a Joomla developer,i work with all these evryday and every moment. Goodluck with your site. IF you need any help,you can contact me. Thanks..
Thanks man, I added you on MSN, AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo I might need some help at some point for sure...so are those all development extensions?
The extensions Joomla Dude listed are the "Rolls Royce" of extensions. These have been around for a LONG time and have great respect and are widely used. They are very mature projects that have ongoing development and lots of community support. And they are all either free or nominal (dirt cheap) cost. You cannot go wrong with the list he's provided.
Great to know that,you have added me up in your IM. I have also added you Well,if you face any sort of errors and you need any knid of help in building your site,then just ping me on MSN or yahoo. I will help you immediately. Cheers mate..
By far is Advanced SEF, its not free but I use it on www.cellubration.com and I love it, also it create URL's on the fly meaning no server load is being applied, not to mention you can create Unique URLs. Its just an overall nice program.
ey!.. can you guys provide a mambot for url or permalinks.. im still having a creppy permalinks ..maybe you could suggest one..
sh404SEF is a must have too (on my view) i build 3 websites using that component without no problem so far. if you wanna build e-commerce site using joomla, Virtuemart is the ideal component. regards
sh404SEF has always worked well for me too on at least 50 or so installations of Joomla. Common mistakes or problems are normally related to your htaccess file although with this one you can over-ride its use. Not turning it on is another problem, you must look at all the setting. Joomla 1.5 by the way can do SEF URL's without any thirdparty add-on. What you may not get is SEF URL's for some components but then again you may find that some of the components are now making use of Joomla's built in SEF URL's. I would suggest you try turning on Joomla's first and see what you get, you may be surprised. sh404SEF has changed developer's or moved over to a new company the same developer working for the new company. (Sept.2009) It will cost a bit for a membership to get the latest version. However I have not had any issues with the last version i downloaded. Unfortunately the last version of anything will only be good for a short period of time before you have to update it to the latest version. Best or most popular extensions for Joomla are listed in the extension directory at Joomla. Commercial does not mean no listing at Joomla, it's all about the type of license used for the component, module or plugin.
rokbridge is an awsome extention that allows you to integrate forums with your template and singlesignon.
Modules In Content is a handy freebie. It allows you to put a module in articles. For example your Google adsense banner might be module 45, anywhere in your content you can put {module 45} and your ad will run. Its great with polls and other script that doesn't work inside a normal article. Sexy Bookmarks is cool if you want people to share content on facebook and the like. Everything else mentioned is great too. Hit me up if you run into trouble, I have about 5 sites using Joomla and I love using it. Good Luck!