The default Joomla installation includes a Front Page component that allows you to manage articles that appear on your home page. This is a nice feature, but if you want to divide your home-page content into categories, like an online magazine or newspaper, you will need a different plugin.

One of my clients has an online magazine and wanted the show introduction text, or a teaser, from 5 different categories on their site, and they wanted to display each secton in a different location. Furthermore, they wanted individual control of each category so they could show, for example, 1 article from one category, 2 articles from a second category, and 6 articles from another category. Finally, they wanted to articles to display automatically, so that as they published new articles, the latest articles would automatically show up on their home page as a teaser with the thumbnail of the aritcle image.

The MiniFrontPage module fulfilled their requirements perfectly. What’s more, you can use it multiple times on a page, making it a perfect choice for content rich sites that are continually updated.

The following is a list of configuration settings for the module:

• Specify the pages on which the module will display
• Specify the number columns in which to display the teasers
• Specify which sections and categories from which to display articles
• Specify to display article title, author, article date
• Specify intro text length
• Specify thumbnail inclusion and thumbnail site
• Specify the number of articles to display
• And more…

Unfortunately, there are a few drawbacks to this module:

• Unless your Joomla template module already has locations you can use for this module, you will need to edit your Joomal template and adjust the design to accomodate the module.
• The module does not use Joomla’s Intro Text feature if you set the article parameter to NOT include intro text, plus, it will not use the image from the intro text.

Several recent clients needed a photo gallery for Joomla. Their requirements, as usual, were that it be easy to use. One would assume that a Joomla photo gallery would be easy to use, but my experience with Joomla photo galleries tells me that is not the case. They are often difficult to install and confusing for the client to use.

Lucky for me, I found RSGallery2, a free Photo Gallery component for Joomla. The price is right, but does it have the features you would expect in a photo gallery?

The following is a list of RSGallery2 features:

• VERY easy to install
• VERY easy to use
• Can bulk upload of a zip file of images (this feature is AWESOME and saves a great deal of time)
• Very easy to manage image galleries
• Easy to configure
• Automatic thumbnail creation and sizing (configurable)
• Automatic image resizing (configurable)
• User comments and voting
• Front-end users can create their own galleries and upload their own images (configurable)
• Automatic image branding and watermarking (configurable)
• Image search
• Image download link
• Ability to display random images
• Ability to display latest images
• And the list goes on

Most important, though, for ME and for my clients, is that RSGaller2 is easy to install, configure, and use. In addition, the default gallery display looks very nice.

I give this Joomla Photo Gallery Component 5 stars.

ChronoForms is an excellent and FREE Joomla component for creating forms within the Joomla Content Management System (CMS).

ChronoForms iseasy to install and pretty easy to use. There isn’t much documentation, but they provide a good introduction video and have an excellent forum. Also, they are very responsive to questions on the forum, but if you are in the United States, there will be about a 12 hour delay because ChronoEngine is in England.

The best thing about ChronoForms is that you can create your forms using Dreamweaver or any text editor. This is especially helpful when you have a big form containing more than five fields. Once you have created and styled the form, you can paste the html code into ChronoForms.

Other features that make ChronoForms a great choice for integrating forms into Joomla CMS:

• Extensive built-in form validation scripts
• The ability to add your own php or javascript valadation to the form
• Easily creates a database table to hold the form data.
• The ability to view submitted data using the Joomla Administration screens.
• The ability to easily download form data and save it as a CSV file or an Excel file.
• The ability to add the form to your menu or embed it in a content page.

The one big flaw in ChronoForms is that it is probably NOT the right form tool for non-technical users. But then I think the creation of forms is probably one of the more technical aspects of building a website. As a result, maybe the building of forms should be left to web designers. However, it would be nice to have a WYSIWYG, point-and-click form plugin for Joomla where anyone who can use a word processor could build a form. Phil Taylor’s PhilaForm comes close to that, but the validation functions are too difficult for non-technical users.

Finally, even though ChronoForms is FREE, you will have to pay $25 for a five-site license to remove the ChronoForms link that appears below all forms. As I have said before, paying for plugins is a GOOD idea. In fact, I think it’s the right thing to do. Unless you are building a site for a non-profit or a personal site that is NOT commercial, it’s only fair to pay for the work of others. And twenty-five dollars is a small fee to pay for a tool that does so much.

The JCal Pro, renamed to JCal Client, is a GREAT calendar and events plugin for Joomla. There are many reasons that this plugin is great.

First of all, JCal is very easy to use. Non-technical users can easily create, edit, or remove calendar events. Plus, users who have JCal permiisons can access JCal from the Joomla front end. This is a very nice feature, especially if you don’t want your calendar managers to access Joomla’s backend.

Second, JCal has beautiful styling right out of the box. But if you want to modify the look and feel of Jcal calendar, you can easily do so by modifying the css style sheet.

JCal is not a free plugin, but it’s well worth the $5 for a 24-hour access to the download, or, for developers, a yearly fee of $20. I’ve heard complaints on forums about charging for plugins, but I think it is only fair to pay for the tools you use.

I have looked long and hard for a reliable, easy-to-use shopping cart, ecommerce component for the Joomla Content Management System (CMS). More specifically, I looked for a shopping cart, ecommerce component that integrates seamlessly into Joomla. This means that you can administer the shopping cart from within the Joomla administration screens, and that the shopping cart pages blend into the current Joomla template’s design. My conclusion is that such a component DOES NOT EXIST.

Of course there is Virtuemart, the free, opensource shopping cart built to integrate into Joomla. But after implementing Virtuemart for a client, I have to say that Virtuemart is NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME.

Many claim that Virtuemart is easy to use, and it is, at least for the cart administrator. But I found that the installation and configuration of Virtuemart to be full of bugs and gotchas. First, there is really NO Virtuemart documentation. Instead, I had to search the forum and sift through dozens of unanswered questions to find answers to problems and bugs that prevented Virtuemart from working without error messages or failures.

Virtuemart is just too difficult to install and get working correctly. For example, I can install and configure Joomla in about an hour, and that includes installing several components. But Virtuemart took days to work out all the bugs. The amount of bugs in the program is unacceptable to me. Unless I have a client whose bottom line is “Low Cost” I cannot justify using this unstable program. It’s much easier and less stressful to install and configure X-Cart or Ecommerce Templates, two popular commercial shopping carts. And, ultimately, it costs less to install and configure these carts, even though I have to do a LOT of work to integrate them with Joomla, because I don’t have to spend days searching a forum for answers and editing the source code to fix bugs. Plus, the commercial products have documentation to explain how to use them, such a helpful feature.

Virtuemart could be a GREAT program and become the default Joomla Ecommerce component, but the developer is overworked and under-staffed. If this project could get some support, it could be great, but I think someone will develop a more reliable and powerful program before that happens. At the end of the day, Free is not the most important thing, especially if you’re trying to make money on the web: what’s important to ecommerce is reliability, support, and a large and flexible set of ecommerce functions.

I have been keeping my eye on Joomla Equipment’s ecommerce component (joomlaequipment.com/content/blogcategory/13/67/). This component is still under development, but it promises to be a GREAT Joomla ecommerce solution. Because this component will eventually be integrated with their JContentSubscription - Pay and Read Content Component, it could be the ultimate Joomla ecommerce component. I have many clients who want to sell products AND subscriptions using the same checkout process, and this tool might eventually provide that capability. If it does, I’d gladly pay for it.

The willingness to pay for a reliable Joomla ecommerce component make me think that “Free” is one of the flaws of the Joomla licensing structure. Developers need to be paid for their time. If they can make enough money by developing free products, great. But I think the reason that Virtuemart is an unfinished and unreliable product is because its developer has to have a day job to afford working on Virtuemart. As a web designer, I am glad to pay for products that work and that are documented. Whether it’s a subscription payment, like with JCE Editor or JCal Calendar tool, or an outright purchase of the software like Philaform, I don’t care. I just want software that works so I’m not left on my own when I encounter bugs and issues and have nowhere to go for help.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope that someday soon, I can find a rebust, reliable, and full-featured Joomla ecommerce component.

I was working on a fast-paced project, a Joomla website update, and the client wanted a flash-like header on the home page that changed the image every few seconds and stopped after three images. I’m not a flash developer and didn’t think I could complete this requirement within the deadline. Meanwhile, I searched the Joomla Extensions directory and found a GREAT FREE image rotator that did almost exactly what the client requested: Joomlaworks Simple Image Rotator. The only problem was that the image rotator did not stop the rotation. The client was OK with this, but it was NOT their ideal.

I posted a question on the Simple Image Rotator forum; I asked if there was a way to stop the image rotation. pansoru (username) wrote back and asked why I wanted to stop the image rotation. I explained that my client wanted to play three images, each with a message and then end on the last, and most important image/message.

A few hours later, I received an email from the forum:

“Well as panosru, i love to help people, lucky you i love to do it and as joomlaworks!

Replace the mod_jw_sir.js with the one i attached to this post.

after that open the js file and go to line 14. Somewhere on this line i have the totalImages = 4 code, replace the 4 with the number of the pictures that you want to show, in your case the number is 3.

Tested on: IE6/IE7/Firefox 2/Safari 3/Opera 9″

Simply because he likes helping people, panasru modified the script so I could configure it to stop after x number of images had displayed. It worked perfectly. Now that’s service! I was so delighted, I donated $20 dollars to Joomlaworks.

What’s more, Joomlaworks makes several other commercial Joomla plugins that are GREAT:

• Simple Image Rotator Pro (12 Euros) - This is an extended version of the simple image rotator and many great features. This extension allows you to add multiple slideshows to any content page, AND it has the ability to popup a larger image if the users clicks an image.
• Front Page Image Rotator (22 Euros) - This extension allows you to insert a slideshow on your home page that rotates through articles and images. For example, if you sell products, the Front Page Image Rotator can rotate the products and images.

I had a VERY stressful website job and was way over budget. The thing that was giving me the most heartburn was a form I had to build with 80 fields! That’s right: 80 fields! I have built some large forms by hand writing php code, but it’s very time consuming. And when you add a database to the form, even more time consuming.

I’d read about a couple form tools in the Joomla Extensions and both seemed to be powerful, complex tools. But I was stressed and out of time and I wanted a simple point-and-click form builder that wasn’t going to take three days to learn. And then I discovered PhilaForm Form Building Component for Joomla. This component was a real lifesaver for me. I was able to install and build the 80 field form and the database in about 4 hours!

This component has an easy-to-use javascript verification script for checking almost any field validation you can think of. Even with 80 fields, the verfication was fast and intuitive.

The only downside to this script is the cost and the support. The component costs around $40 U S dollars. That might seem kind of high, but when you consider the time savings, it’s worth it. Money well spent. But for $40 dollars, I expect at least some reasonable forum response time. I posted two quetions on the forum over two weeks ago and neither of them have been answered. There was an indication that Phil Taylor, the developer, had a heart attached sometime in the last two months, so maybe he’s still recovering from that. Luckily, the software is pretty easy to use.

Joomap is a Joomla component that automatically creates a sitemap of your joomla site. This wonderful, free component is easily configurable. For example, you can exclude specific menu items from the sitemap, and you can configure the sitemap layout. In addition, you can edit the Joomap .css file to change the look of the Joomap unordered lists.

Joomla is the Swiss Army Knife of Content Management Systems because of it’s Components, Mods, and Plugins. The default Joomla text editor is TinyMCE, a web based Javascript/HTML WYSIWYG editor control released as open source. It’s a nice little editor, but it not very user friendly, especially for html novices. And lets face it, many of the people using Joomla are HTML novices. That’s why they use Joomla: So they can easily update their website without calling a web site designer.

The JCE Text Editor, by Ryan Demmer is a wonderful upgrade to the TinyMCE editor.

The following is a list of just a few of the great features in JCE:

• Image Upload and Insertion: JCE’s image upload and insertion is a vast improvement over the default Joomla image manager. With this feature, web site novices can easily upload and insert images into their article and documents and even do right or left image floats just be selecting left or right alignment.
• File Upload and Insertion: Like the Image Upload and Insertion, this feature allows you to easily upload and link to non-html documents such as .doc, .pdf, and .xls. Again, this feature makes is so novice users can easily upload and link to non-html documents.
• Insert/Edit Link: Normally, to link to a joomla article, you have to copy the url from the page you have to link to and then open an article, create a link, and paste the URL into the link dialog screen. With JCE’s Insert/Edit link feature, you can select text or an image, click the Insert/Edit Link tool, and then select from a list of Sections, Categories, Articles, Static Content, Contacts, Menu Items, or URLs. Again, even a website novice can now easily add links.

The license fee for this module is $20 per year, AND you can install it on multiple domains. This is an incredible deal. Plus, Ryan’s support is EXCELLENT. JCE requires very specific server configuration (pretty common for LAMP servers), and I had some problems installing it the first time, mostly because of errors on my part. But I posted my problem on the JCE forum and Ryan answered promptly (I’m in the U S and Ryan’s in South Africa). Even with his email assistance, I couldn’t get JCE to work correctly. Finally, Ryan logged into my web server and fixed the issue in minutes. Now that’s service!

My only complaint about JCE is this: WHY IS THIS COMPONENT NOT INCLUDED IN THE DEFAULT JOOMLA INSTALLATION?