The Best Joomla Extensions
Joomla is one of the most popular free open source content management systems available on the internet. It is used to power hundreds of thousands of various website ranging from personal blogs to business websites and even government run sites. Joomla provides a powerful set of features and tools that allow website owners to easily publish content to the web, promote it and completely customize the look and feel of their website. Although these core functions are brilliant, there are hundreds of extensions that have been developed by Joomla developers and 3rd parties that further improve or add new functionality to the software.
What Is A Joomla Extension
A Joomla extension is the equivalent of a WordPress Plugin or a Drupal Module. It’s an additional script that can be plugged in to Joomla to provide it with entirely new functionality, ranging from little display tweaks all the way to complete overhauls such as ecommerce and shopping cart solutions. Extensions listed on the Joomla extension directory are safe to use and are provided by hundreds of Joomla developers from around the world as open source applications.
The Top 5 Joomla Extensions
The Joomla extensions directory holds more than 8,000 extensions that can be used with your website, all of which a free to download and install. It can be hard searching through more than 8,000 extensions to find ones that suit your needs however there a few relatively popular ones that may be of interest to you and your projects. These include:
1. K2
K2 is an advanced content extensions available for download from the Joomla Extension directory and boasts more than 1.2 million downloads. K2 provides out-of-the-box solutions featuring rich content forms, nested level categories, additional fields and a powerful API.
2. RedShop
Redshop is a complete ecommerce solutions extension for Joomla that provides the functionality required to turn your Joomla website into a fully featured shopping cart. Redshop allows you to list products for sales, take payments, provide shipping and additional items, vouchers, coupons and an entire internal template system.
3. Social Share and Vote Button
Social share and vote button is a simple but powerful extensions that allows website owners to display social network sharing buttons within their content for popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and many more. Adding social sharing buttons to your website is a great way to increase your exposure through the ability for your visitors to share your content with their friends.
4. XMap
XMap is a powerful sitemap generator for Joomla that uses the menu structure of your website to create a search engine friendly sitemap that allows bots/crawlers to better crawl and index your website, making the perfect addition to the SEO power of your website.
5. Admin Tools
Admin Tools is a complete tool set for administrators that features a range of functionality to assist in the safe, secure and optimized performance of Joomla powered websites. Some of the functionality that Admin Tools extension offers includes the notification of new Joomla versions, repair of file and directory permissions, the protection of the administrator directory, perform database maintenance and migrate any links on your site pointing to an old or incorrect domain.
Browse The Extension Directory
The above 5 extensions are some of the best available and all offer a range of functionality that improves upon the core of Joomla. However, with the official Joomla extension directory housing more than 8000 different extensions, it’s well worth browsing through there to see if there are any others that may suit your needs or provide a certain set of features that may further improve your own website.
You may also be interested in reading about the best Joomla SEO extensions.
