People often ask me what my favorite extensions are for Joomla and what extensions we use at Pixel Point Creative Graphic design. I thought I would share my thoughts.

Development Related:

1. Although it is not only for Joomla, by far the most useful tool in my arsenal when developing with Joomla is Firebug. Firebug is an add on for the Firefox browser that allows you to trouble shoot your code. Indispensable! I could go into great detail about all the features it has, but I won’t. I assure you that once you use it, you will never be without it. It is kind of like going from dial up to high-speed internet. Once you get it, you never go back.
LINK: www.getfirebug.com

2. NinjaXplorer: this is an extension by Ninja Forge. It is a fork of Joomla explorer for Joomla 1.0 and allows you to view all of your Joomla files in a manner similar to Windows Explorer.
LINK:www.ninjaforge.com/index.php?option=com_…id=44&Itemid=235

3. JCE- The Joomla Content Editor is a WYSIWYG editor that is far superior to the included Tiny editor. You can upload images. link to PDFs and so much more. This should be in the core of Joomla.
LINK:www.joomlacontenteditor.net

4. Joomla Pack – Creates a site backup that can be restored on any Joomla!-capable server. It creates a full backup of your site in a single archive. The archive contains all the files, a database snapshot and a restoration script (derived from the standard Joomla! installer).
LINK:www.joomlapack.net

5.Jback Up -A plugin that backups the database of Joomla!1.5 site daily and sends it you via email.
LINK:www.joomler.net

Others:

1. Kunena- Powerful Joomla forum.
LINK:www.kunena.com

2.Jom Social- Create your own social network like Facebook or Myspace. Quite powerful and full featured.
LINK:www.jomsocial.com/?referrer=552044

3. Quick FAQ- Create a powerful and full featured FAQ section.
LINK:www.schlu.net

4. RS Tickets- Advanced Joomla! Help Desk ticketing system. We also use this on our site. We Love it! Works great.
LINK:secure.avangate.com/order/product.php?PR…1&AFFILIATE=5507

5.Nbill- Complete online billing solution. Enable you to manage financial transactions, orders, and invoicing for your business, and to offer products and services for sale online using order forms that you can build yourself.
LINK:www.nbill.co.uk

6. Teamlog- Web based Time Tracking Solution for Joomla! 1.5 focused on simplicity. I use this everyday. Simple and powerful.
LINK:teamlog.yootheme.com

7. Project Fork- Joomla’s best project management component.
LINK:www.projectfork.net

8. Anything Tabs- This is a Pixel Point Creative plugin that allows you to add links to your social network sites. It comes with tabs for many popular sites like twitter, facebook, you tube, myspace and more. They are presented as static links located in the bottom corner. You can see these tabs in action on many of our demos and on our own website Joomla Templates

These are only some of the many great extensions available for Joomla. The Joomla extensions directory is updated frequently and there are many options in many categories to fulfill just about every need out there. I use Joomla everyday and have been developing Joomla sites for the past 4+ years so I have tested and used many different extensions. My list is based on extensions I use everyday and that I recommend.

Grab pragmatic things to know about one way links – please study the web page. The times have come when proper info is really within your reach, use this possibility.

joomla how to joomla

Without customizing the open source CMS powerhouse Joomla is a powerful and customizable application that you can use for just about any web project you have. The core code of Joomla and easy to use administration interface allows you to build together complex websites without having to really dive into any PHP code. This is why Joomla has become one of the most popular open source content management systems in the entire world.

But one thing it lacks without customization is it’s ability to be fully SEO optimal. Thanks to the Open Source community around Joomla, there are many extensions that are also open source that you can configure to give your Joomla hosted website the SEO abilities it needs. If you host Joomla on Bluehost then you will have no problem installing and configuring the plugins necessary for SEO. Here are the 5 most effective SEO plugins for the Joomla CMS.

1. SEOSimple
Simply put, this extension auto generates meta tags for each page on your Joomla website. It also gives you the ability to manually customize your meta tags on each specific page within your site so that you can get the most from your page title and meta descriptions. Since the page title is on of the more critical elements of SEO, this plugin is a must as is the ability to customize these page titles throughout your site.
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/4102/details

2. Joomap
Ever heard of an XML Sitemap? I’m sure you have. It’s what search engines, mainly Google need in order to comprehend the entire structure of your website and to be able to scan through all of your content. The Joomap plugin for Joomla auto generates these sitemaps for you on a regular basis so you don’t have to create them yourself. This way you can save time and ensure that all of your content is being crawled and indexed.
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/202/details

3. Joomla SEF Component
By default Joomla does not create SEO friendly URL’s. So a typical Joomla install may give you a URL like yourwebsite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=3&Itemid=41. See the issue with this? This plugin will allow you to change this URL to something like yourwebsite.com/about-us or something of your choosing. This is a critical element to SEO and this plugin takes care of it for you.
http://www.artio.net/en/joomla-extensions/joomla-seo-sef-component-artio-joomsef

4. J!Redirect 301
This plugin very easily gives you the functionality for controlling all of your 301 redirects from the Joomla admin screen. So if you have old pages that you have deleted, or other domains that you want to point to your website, this plugin will help you manage all of that. This is specifically helpful to those who are not comfortable editing a .htacess file on their own.
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/structure-&-navigation/url-redirection/7996/details

There you have it. Use these plugins and you will be capable of getting your Joomla website up to the top of the organic search rankings along with the great content your are producing. If you are still in need of hosting for your Joomla project, check out this Bluehost review resource for information on how Bluehost is best suited for Joomla powered websites.

Find out realistic advice in the sphere of Web Design – please make sure to study the web site. The times have come when proper info is really within one click, use this possibility.

joomla how to joomla

Here is a short tutorial on

how to assign multiple templates

to articles and pages in your joomla website.

1. Go to your template manager: Extensions >Template manager.
2. Click the theme you want to apply to a page

In the menu assignment box: Click the: “Select from list” radio button

Now you can select the menu link to the page you want the theme to be shown on.

• Hold the ctrl key while selecting if you wish to select more than one page.

If your article doesn’t have a menu link then you cant apply the theme.

You can make a main menu link to your article to get the theme to work.

To make a menu link see: http://creativedigiworks.com/blog/2009/10/new-article-with-menu-link-joomla/

Its that easy!

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A short tutorial on how to upload and embed images into your articles using

the JCE editor for joomla 1.5

Open the article you wish to embed the image into & click the “add/edit image“ button

Next, click the “Upload” button to open the upload option window

Click “add” button to browse your computer for the image you wish to upload

Click "add" to browse for image

Navigate to the image on your computer, select it and click “open“

After you select your image and click open, you will see your file in the upload queue. Click the “upload” button and your image will now upload to joomla.

When the upload is complete you will see your image name appear in the list. To embed this image into your article, click on the image name from the list and then edit the image settings at the top of the window. Now click the “insert” button at the bottom & your image will appear in your article where the cursor was left or within the selected table.

Now hit “apply” or “save” the article and test it out in your internet browser!

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A basic overview on enabling the search engine friendly URLs for Joomla 1.5

To enable the SEF for Joomla:

• Login to admin
• Choose the “Global Configuration” option
• You will now see the SEO settings on the right

SEF Url’s without apache mod_rewrite

To enable SEF Url’s on a server which does not support apache mod_rewrite, change the search engine friendly URLs checkbox from No to Yes

Save the changes by selecting the save button.

The component name and item id is now removed from the Url and replaced with “index.php/frontpage”

SEF Url’s using apache mod_rewrite

Most hosting companies include mod_rewrite support as part of their web hosting package.

Using this option is the most common approach when using SEF Urls

To enable SEF Urls with Mod_Rewrite you need to do the following.

1. Using an FTP client access the directory where you have installed Joomla 1.5
2. You will see a file called htaccess.txt
3. Before you enable the SEF Urls you need to rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess
4. Rename this file using your ftp client.
5. In your Joomla SEO settings change the buttons for both the search engine friendly URLs and Use Apache mod_rewrite from No to Yes
6. The settings will look like this:

Now save your changes.

Your URLs will now look like this:

http://creativedigiworks.com/services

Add Suffix to URLs

Joomla 1.5 also supports the option to add the suffix .html at the end:

enable the suffix url option:

Change  button next to Add suffix to Urls from No to Yes

Your URLs will now look like this:

http://www.creativedigiworks.com/services.html

ITS THAT EASY!

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