Five Power Extensions for Joomla

We take a look at five free extensions for Joomla, which can help make your Joomla site more feature rich and secure

Thursday, January 01, 2009

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Joomla perhaps doesn't need any introduction. It's one of the most well-known content management system and portal engine. Here we shall be looking at a few free extensions that would help you turn your Joomla portal into an attention hog.

Blogs
If you want your Joomla portal or a part of the portal to appear in the blog layout, you can easily do this by using integral blog features of Joomla. However, if you want all the blog features like Word Press or any other blogging platform, you will need to use one of the blog extensions available for Joomla. One of these, which we really found useful for blogging is “IDoBlog” Extension. It can be downloaded from http://community. idoJoomla.com/download.html. Available in both paid and free versions, IDoBlog is easy to implement. All you need to do is install IDoBlog component. Once installed you can access CPanel of IDoBlog component from the Component Manager of Joomla administrator console. Here go to global configuration, to configure its main options. Under Notifications, you can configure whether you want admin, authors and users notified about latest posts, comments etc. To allow users to be able to blog on your portal, create a new menu and under 'Select Menu Item Type' option, choose “Write to blog” menu type under IDoBlog. This would simply allow users coming to the site, to post a blog from the front-end.

Virtual keyboard
This extension allows you to have a virtual keyboard for your Joomla portal. If you are running an ecommerce site or even a non-commercial site that stores critical information pertaining to your users, which if stolen can cause a lot of damage, then this extension is a must for you. With virtual keyboard, you can protect your users against keyloggers, trojans and other password stealing malware, which could be running on his machine. This also comes in handy when users are trying to access their accounts from public machines, as such machines might be infected or even a targeted attack could be running on them. Deploying and using this extension is very simple. It can be downloaded from http://www.rawdev.net/category/Joomla/joomkey/ . Once installed, you can find it under module manager. First enable the module and define position of the keyboard, depending upon the portal design. Now whenever a user clicks on a login/password box, automatically a floating virtual keyboard will appear. This extension works fine with IE and Firefox. However, you might face some issues when using it in Chrome.

VirtueMart – Shopping Cart for Joomla
This extension allows you to integrate popular shopping cart software VirtueMart with Joomla. It can be downloaded from http://virtuemart.net. If you are looking for an easy way to sell products online on your Joomla portal, then this extension can help you. It also has support for 16 payment methods which can be customized. You can add new payment methods also. Once you have uploaded this extension, you can access it from Components>VirtueMart. When you go there for the first time after installation, it will greet you with a welcome screen and ask you whether you would like to install sample data for your shopping cart or go directly to the shop. If you are using a shopping cart software for the first time, it's recommended to choose, install sample data option, as it will familiarize you with the solution. Next you will see the Control panel of your store. Here you can activate payment method type, Add/Remove and publish products, track orders, add tax rates, view reports, manage users and perform other shopping cart related admin tasks. A lot more plugins and extensions for VirtueMart can be found on this website.

Under Notifications of the CPanel of IDoBlog component, you can configure whether you want to notify users about the latest posts or not.

jSecure authentication
One of the most common ways to find out if a site is created in Joomla is by simply typing domainname/administrator (www.sitename.com/administrator). This allows hackers to directly attack Joomla's administration console, and at times perform a brute force attack to crack user ID and password. This nifty extension denies access to backend administration console without a proper access key. Using this extension is simple, it can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/ 57zg2f.

Once installed, you can access it from plugin manager. Under plugin edit option, you can modify the access key, which by default is “ jSecure”. Here you can also modify redirect path. If someone tries to access the back-end console without an access key. Once enabled you can access administration console by typing, http://www.site name/administrator/ ?keyname (here instead of keyname provide the key which you had earlier provided in plugin edit.

AllVideos
This is a one-stop media management extension for Joomla. With video sharing becoming popular, you will find videos related to just about anything you are planning to write about. Instead of giving external links to that video, it makes sense just to simply embed it in your content.

This extension allows you to do that in a really simple way. Extension can be downloaded from http://Joomlaworks. googlecode.com/files/ plg_jw_allvideos -v2.5.3_j1.5.zip. Once installed you can find 'AllVidoes' under plugin manager. Once enabled, using this extension is really simple. You don't need to copy-paste any HTML code. For eg, if you want to embed an video with URL: http://video. yahoo.com/ watch/ 1385962/ 4769356, you can simply do this by inserting {yahoo1385962 / 4769356 (/yahoo)}.

The jSecure plugin denies access to the backend admin console without a proper access key.

This also allows all the external users who might be blogging on your Joomla portal, to embed videos within blogs. However, you would need to educate them about the process first. Entire tag list of AllVideos can be found at http://www.Joomlaworks.gr/content/view/35/41/. As it supports almost every video provider, the list would be too exhaustive to be published here.

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