Useful and Popular Joomla Extensions

Joomla is a leading open source content management (CMS) with an almost dominating market share together with WordPress.
Joomla is written in PHP, stores data in MySQL and includes many useful features out of the box such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, search, and support for language internationalization.
Joomla by itself is an excellent CMS but what really makes it stand out is it’s expandability and the strong community supporting it with almost endless amount of free and premium templates and extension to the standard functionality.
This article gives you an overview of the best and most commonly used extension for Joomla that you should be aware of if you are considering using it.

Note :

• Beginners Guide ( Joomla )
• How to install extensions?

Community

These extensions are useful when you are connecting your website or blog with Social networks,users communities,collaborative management tools, project management,work flow systems.

Community builder

Community Builder extends the Joomla! user management system.Useful to build your valuable relationships between users.CB is compatible with all Joomla! 1.5 native, Joomla! 1.0.x native.CB is open-source and free.This component is just great once you get to configure it to have a look as you would like,works great and there are a lot of plug-ins available for CB to make it even more richer and fully packed.
Main features:

• Extra fields in profile
• Enhanced registration work flows
• User lists
• Connection paths between users
• Admin defined tabs and user profiles
• Front-end work flow management
• Integration with other components, like PMS, Newsletter, Forum, Galleries. and has a support with many third party applications .

Joomunity

Joomunity builds dynamic and vibrant community sites with lots of inspiration from popular networks like Face book, My Space, Net log and Beboo, joomunity compiles a set of useful and easy to build applications to enable effective collaboration amongst Joomla Site users. The styling/css editing is easy.It’s compatible with Joomla 1.5
Key features:

• Build an on-line community like Facebook in minutes.
• Beautiful JavaScript powered interface
• AJAX and other technologies make the user experience even better
• Highly extensible with addition of ‘applications’ From profile play lists, to simple to-do lists.
• User Relationship management.
• Photo Management.
• Private messaging support.
• Multiple Blogging component support.
• Multiple Forum CMS support Fireboard, SMF, PHPBB
• Multilingual support.

E-Commerce

Extensions are about Affiliates, Shopping cart, Billing and invoices, payment gateways etc…

Virtuemart

Complete e-Commerce shopping cart solution for Joomla! – used by thousands of store owners. It can be run in Store and Catalog-Mode.Using its  powerful administration Tool you can handle an unlimited Number of Categories, Products, Orders, Discounts, Shopper Groups and Customers.
Additional addons:
There are more than ten additional addons are available for virtuemart Administration,categories,import,menus ,orders ,payment Systems ,products display,products search,promotions ,related Products,shipping,stats and uploads

Simplecaddy

You can create your shopping cart easily and quickly,without the need of setting up a complete shop. Simple,but powerful. SimpleCaddy redirect the money to your PayPal account. Simple to set up and use.
Features : Easy to install,Easy to configure,Front-end display options, order management, product categories and PayPal settings are made in minutes!, widely customizable: shipping, vouchers and multi-languages support.

Editors

JCE Editor

This is a must have extension for every site.An advanced, configurable WYSIWYG editor for Joomla! based on Moxie code’s TinyMCE.Includes advanced Image/Media, File and Link handling, plugin support, and an Administration interface for editor configuration.Compatible with Joomla 1.5.And this editor has some more extensions to add a valuable features for this editor.

Joomla CK Editor

The JoomlaCK Editor is powerful and a feature rich editor for Joomla CMS. Its performance is truly amazing, thanks to its brand-new state-of-the-art JavaScript API engine, People  are calling the next generation of internet based editors. It’s up-to-date with the new JavaScript development requirements, offering a rich and powerful integration and interaction API. Its architecture is totally plug-in based, and it can be extended and modified in all senses to fit all needs. It’s fully screen reader compatible, keyboard only usable and complies with the W3C WCAG and the US Section 508 accessibility standards. It also offers a unique high contrast feature.

Languages

Joomfish

JoomFish is the best solution for your multilingual website . The core extension is free of charge and allows the translation of any content within your Joomla system. With an easy extension it is also possible to translate any 3rd party extension available for your favored CMS.JoomFish 2.0 is the full featured release including several addons.
The Joom!Fish club offers enhanced support options and a range of add ons targeted at commercial and professional websites.

Photo galleries

List of media gallery components available for Joomla!

Simple image gallery

Adding image galleries inside your Joomla! contents is now super-easy and simple, using the “Simple Image Gallery” Plugin for Joomla! 1.0.x & 1.5.x.
The gallery features stylish shadows on each thumbnail and “lightbox” popups to display the original images.
Advantages
a) No need to have an additional gallery component to display a few images.
b)Focus more on content writing and less on administering the images.
The plugin is ideal for news portals wanting to display some product images.
You can have as many galleries as you want inside each content itemFuture releases will feature more control over the galleries created as well as different representations!.

Phoca gallery

Phoca Gallery is a Joomla! component. It is an image gallery with slideshow.It has more than five additional extensions to improve this module features like slideshow plugin,phocaflow,gallery tree module, Image module etc…

Joom gallery

JoomGallery is a gallery component completely integrated into Joomla.Compatible with Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5
Features:

• CSS-based layout
• Lightbox views.
• Support for user profiles in Community Builder, Community Builder Enhanced and JomSocial
• EasyCapture for comments
• Configurable watermarks
• EXIF and IPTC image data support
• Access rights
• User-created uploads and categories
• Configurable view of Top lists (top rated, last added, last commented, most viewed)
• Several upload possibilities from back end and front end (single upload, batch upload (Zip), FTP upload, Java upload)

Backup

These extensions are for back up your stored and added data.Using these extension you can clone and restore your data too.

Akeeba backup

It is an open-source backup component for the Joomla. Mission is simple: create 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 an installer similar in function to the standard Joomla! installer. The backup and restore process is AJAX powered to avoid server timeouts, even with huge sites. Reliable, easy to use, open source backup solution for your Joomla! site, try it out.
Features:

• AJAX powered restore
• Restore without unpacking backup.
• Unattended backup mode (CRON job)
• Move your site between hosts and much much more!

Lazy backup

This backup plugin will save your time.It sends a backup every hours/every days of your Joomla database in a zip file to one or multiple emails. The best and easiest automatic backup method for Joomla 1.5 projects. No need  server tools like cron or scheduled tasks.Easy to restore your database via the import function of PhpMyAdmin.

Other popular modules

JEvents

The best events Calendar for Joomla. JEvents consists of a Joomfish compatible Joomla component and a number of modules and plugins.

All videos

The all-in-one media management solution for Joomla! and a must have extension for all Joomla based website.You can use the plug-in to easily embed videos hosted on popular services like YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo (and many more) inside your Joomla content items. Dozens of features are available in this plug-in.

Aca joom (Newsletter)

Best and most powerful newsletter component for Joomla. It has been designed with  robustness. It can handle an unlimited number of newsletters with an unlimited number of subscribers in just few clicks. Acajoom reuses some of Joomla 1.5 new concepts to make the users experience as smooth as possible.

Artio JoomSEF

A great SEO component to make your Joomla! website search engine friendly and easily human understandable with metadata and sitemap generation capabilities. Supports URL translations at multilingual sites using JoomFish. Wide component through extension system.
Main features:

• Generate SEF URLs
• Sitemap generation
• Duplicates management
• Multilinguality support
• 301 Re directions management.

RS Form

Easy to use and compatible with Joomla 1.5stable Also. Backup and restore your forms.
If we missed here any useful and popular modules for Joomla websites. Please add in to comments Including your favorite extensions too.