The Best Joomla Extensions
Content Management Systems (CMS) enabled many people with limited experience and technical skills to build and launch their own online businesses with ease. Being one of the most popular platforms of this type, Joomla has played a significant role in all of this.
It has to be said that none of its success would be possible if it weren’t for Joomla’s thousands of extensions that expand its functionality and reshape your website.
Today, we’ll take a look at some of the best plugins and add-ons you can install to your Joomla website.
What is Joomla?
According to W3Techs, Joomla holds 3.5% of the CMS market and powers around 2% of all websites. BuiltWith estimates that over 1.6 million sites use the platform, with a further 565,000 domains redirecting to Joomla pages.
Not a bad track record, given the fact that the project was started in 2005 by a few programmers who weren’t happy with the management of Mambo – another website-building tool that was popular at the time. These programmers thought that Mambo’s development was not entirely in line with the core open-source values, which is why they established Open Source Matters and released Joomla as a Mambo fork.
Written in PHP, Joomla can help you create all sorts of websites, including personal blogs, business, corporate, government websites, news outlets, online shops, and more. The setup is relatively easy, and the content is managed via an intuitive backend interface.
You can get additional Joomla help through detailed support documentation and a global community of developers and users who can help you if you get stuck.
The CMS is often praised for its SEO-friendly default setup, security features, and multilingual content support.
Pretty much anyone, regardless of their background or education, can create a website with Joomla. However, to explore the CMS’s true potential, you’ll need to utilize extensions that can infinitely expand its functionality.
What Do Joomla Extensions Do?
Joomla can act as a solid foundation for your new online project. Its architecture lets you build an interactive website without writing a single line of code, and with the right strategy, the in-built features can help your project grow organically.
As good as it is, Joomla on its own is unlikely to give you all the functionality you need. If you’re going to turn your ideas into a reality, you’ll need to install some extensions.
Different projects have different requirements, and the Joomla core can’t possibly fulfill them all. Thankfully, its vast community of developers often create new extensions that expand your site functionality. With their help, you can customize your website to perfection.
Extensions can be an integral part of your project’s success, but how do you know which ones you’ll need? Let’s see if we can help you answer this question.
The Best Joomla Extensions on the Market
Which extensions you might need depends largely on what you want to achieve.
We’ve put together a selection of some of the most popular Joomla add-ons. Some of them will probably be suitable for your particular project, while others might focus on general things that are not strictly related to your business. Whatever the case – these extensions will show you just how easy it is to transform an entire Joomla website.
JCE
Being able to easily manage every single component of a web page is one of the main reasons for using a CMS in the first place. By default, Joomla employs a content editor called TinyMCE, and anyone who has ever had any experience with a word processing application should have no issues getting used to it.
An extension called JCE promises something even better, though.
JCE stands for Joomla Content Editor and is widely regarded as one of the best extensions in its niche. It replaces Joomla’s default content editor with a new tool that is much more intuitive and feature-rich.
It comes with a WYSIWYG editor, similar to the one that WordPress has, which means you can create and edit pages and articles without knowing the first thing about programming languages.
Text formatting is crucial from an SEO perspective, and JCE gives you all the tools necessary to make this task as easy as possible. Enriching your content with multimedia is also a piece of cake.
JCE has a free and a premium option. The paid version gives you additional features like the ability to resize, crop, and rotate images during upload, an advanced media manager, and an IFrame editor.
Akeeba Backup
You should never underestimate the importance of backups. Unexpected failures and cyberattacks do happen, so it’s always got to check with your hosting provider for your available options.
With ScalaHosting, for example, you have daily backups of your entire hosting account for the last seven days. Restoring the data is as easy as submitting a request to our tech support team.
But there are other solutions to consider.
The Akeeba Backup extension is a tool designed to work specifically with Joomla. It integrates into the CMS core and gives you a one-click backup generation utility. This is especially useful if you’re frequently making updates to your website.
In addition to the files and databases, the extension will also save a restore script so that you can quickly get everything back to its working state in case something breaks.
Akeeba backups can be fully automated, and the extension even takes care of the backup management part for you. For example, if the plugin detects insufficient storage space, it will delete some of the older backups and ensure you always have enough storage for backups.
Best of all, this functionality is available in the extension’s free version. If you choose the Professional edition, you’ll get a few other features, including:
initiating and managing backups through CLI
support for storing backups with widely used cloud storage providers like Dropbox, Amazon, etc.
FTP/SFTP support
encrypted archives
site transfer wizard, and many more
Cache Cleaner
Generally speaking, CMS platforms like Joomla are very easy to use, yet some tasks are still fairly time-consuming. Take cache clearing as an example. The process used to require clicking on a number of menus and submenus in the admin dashboard.
With an extension such as Cache Cleaner, however, you can have a toolbar button that purges cache with a single click. You no longer need to wander around the cache manager and clear the cache manually – an amazing way of saving you time and improving your workflow.
Cache Cleaner can also remove the cached memory every time you save an article, and it can also empty the tmp folder regularly.