Joomla, for those of you who haven’t heard about it, is a ‘management framework’ that is open source and therefore free. It is used to manage the information on the internet and the connections between organizations, via intranet. Think of it as a catalogue or your closet acting as a storage facility for all the stuff you have. In this case, what Joomla stores is every single iota of your site.
This award-winning, user-friendly system helps you to create brilliant apps and set up websites. Businesses everywhere have benefitted from this system and they range from government establishments to e-zines, religious establishments, non-profit organizations to corporate, and so on. You will also see small communities and families using Joomla to great advantage. You might recognize some of the names that use Joomla- Harvard University, MTV and Citibank, among others.
What Joomla also provides, apart from some of the best minds working to create a great web presence for you, is even more capability in the form of extensions. These extensions could be simple languages and templates that change the face of your site or application- like components. Plug-ins is complex tools that handle specific events and are a popular extension form.
Here is a look at the most popular Joomla extensions and plug-ins, highly rated by industry experts and users equally:
- Kunena– Joomla takes open source to a new direction and with Kunena, it extends the idea even further. In the last three years, since its introduction, this community-driven extension has been downloaded a whopping 2,000,000 times. It has all sorts of cool features, including GitHub and documentation help.
- Community Builder is a great extension to the basic Joomla system that offers the user a better understanding of connection paths and ease in the uploading of images along with better registration workflows, user profiles and tabs that are defined by the admin. With extra fields and more, he focus is on extra; actually this is an extension that receives extra love from users everywhere.
- Googlemaps Plug-in is great for displaying maps from the company on your website and ensuring that you’re easily found!
- JoomFish got rave reviews from editors for the ease of its translations. Most sites are country-specific and there is a real time need for simultaneous translations. JoomFish is free, and with it, you can change the language of all components on the site. It is brilliant, easy help.
- Simple Image Gallery is a popular plug-in that can locate images on your site and change it into a tiled, grid-shaped gallery. It is so easy to use that you will not need much else to make your website more appealing.
- Akeeba Backup Core won kudos from editors and users for its ability to back up websites easily and efficiently. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this extension truly offers something different from the rest.
- Xmap extension allows users to create XML sitemaps for websites and is compatible with popular search engines. The striking feature of this extension is that it allows users to create sitemaps with customized preferences. Xmap works on Joomla 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 versions.
- JoomlaXplorer is a file management extension with which users can add, edit, and delete files on the server. With an average rating of 4.68 out of 5, this extension is a must-have that allows webmasters to upload and download files directly from the server.
- RokSlideshow is a JavaScript powered extension letting users easily display images on their websites. With an average rating of 4.5 out of 5, RokSlideshow extension is comprised of six customizable transition types and more than 30 customized push and wipe transition types.
- RSForm is an easy-to-use extension that offers multiple-language support and helps restore forms and create backups. With an average rating of 4.67 out of 5, RSForm allows you to fully customize its codes.
There are many other players in the extension market of Joomla. For instance, you can choose the JCK Editor to turn all things technical into works of art. Phoca Gallery and Expose help you place all your images in slideshows. The wildly popular Events Calendar can help you keep track of important upcoming events in your schedule.
Joomla stands for what the Net initially set out to do: create great content and make it available to everyone. Do explore the site and enjoy all it has to offer.