For Joomla powered new website, necessary extensions installation is as important as quality content creation. So here we’d like to introduce you the top 5 must-have Joomla extensions. Note that these five extensions are in different categories, which include e-commerce, SEO, design, gallery, and social networking.
In order to set up and manage a real popular Joomla site successfully, only have the Joomla and the top 5 extensions installed are not enough, you also need a reliable web host to offer you the best pricing, fast page loading speed, high uptime, and professional technical support. Here, after reviewing more than 150 companies, we sincerely recommend you going with Arvixe, WebHostingHub and JustHost, which have also been recommended by Joomla.org as the best Joomla web hosts.
E-Commerce: JoomShopping
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- Developer: MAXXmarketing GmbH
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JoomShopping is one of the most easy to use e-commerce extensions for Joomla, with more than 200,000 users within 3 years. It includes all the features needed to set up a popular online store, such as multiple payment methods, allowance for product ratings and testimonials, support for adding images, videos, and demos, as well as automatic order confirmation mail.
The types of products sold through this extension are not limited. You not only can sell the common physical goods like clothes, furniture, makeups, but also sell some virtual commodities like music sources or video files.
SEO: SEOSimple
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- Developer: Dao By Design/Ryan
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Remember that if your website cannot be placed within the first 3 pages of searching results, you might be unable to be found by site visitors, even if your website is very appealing and offers what people want. Here, we highly recommend SEOSimple, which is a powerful Joomla extension to improve your search engine optimization.
Search engines often use a webpage’s meta description to decide the ranking in the SERPs, so it is important to match these meta descriptions with the keywords of the page’s content. SEOSimple, therefore, generates the appropriate meta tag when the page is loading, and does not save it to the content’s meta data fields to slow down the page loading speed.
Design: Template Toolbar
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- Developer: Antun Koncic
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Template Toolbar is used to make some replacements for various extensions designed especially for more complex and commercial websites. It has a GUI control layout is intended to be self-explanatory, and consists of four main buttons. The first button enables you to open a pop-up menu displaying the most common Joomla extensions; the second button copies the basic code of your selected extension, the third button enables you to open templateDetails.xml file editor or create sample templateDetails.xml files, and the fourth button displays a pop-up menu from which you can either change program options or display the Help and About window.
Note that Template Toolbar requires Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed on your Windows system, and the version 3.5 or above is recommended. If you want to run it on Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, you’d better have the mono Framework installed.
Photo Gallery: Ozio Gallery
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- Developer: AlexRed
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In order to improve the attractiveness of your website, you might need to add a photo gallery which contains some beautiful images. Ozio Gallery is a photo gallery extension. It allows unlimited photo uploads, automatically resize your images, and support to add image galleries inside your Joomla articles.
To insert a gallery inside your website, you only need to create a menu item relating to the gallery you want, access the Component section in administration page of Ozio Gallery, copy the code of referring to the image you wish to enter in a content, and finally paste the previously copied code where you want inside the article.
Social Networking: JomSocial
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- Developer: JomSocial Team
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JomSocial is a powerful Joomla extension for social networking. What sets it apart from the rest is its highly interactive social steam, with which you can create your own social network with photo and video gallery, and your site visitors can leave the comment on your content. It is supported by many template clubs such as Rockettheme, Joomlashack, Joomlart, JoomShaper, so your choices are unlimited.
Whether you have a website for business or personal branding, creating your own social networking for your niche would have great benefits, for you can free yourself from restrictive social environment and customize your site with unique features and identity.