Joomla 1.5 extensions - 4 extensions your website needs

In February, we posted about the essential Joomla 1.5 extensions that we came across when building websites with Joomla 1.5. Since February, there have been some great new extensions released...

Tomorrow we will be publishing a list of our favourite extensions for Joomla 1.5. From the list that we have compiled, there are 4 extensions which stand out above the rest.

We think these 4 extensions are the most useful extensions currently available for Joomla 1.5.

Here are the extensions in order of importance:

• Sh404sef - Sh404sef is the first extension we install on every Joomla 1.5 website we create. Why? Sh404sef enables you to create search engine friendly URLs, have complete control of meta tags on every page (including title tags, description, keywords, author and language) and add h1 tags to contentheadings and componentheadings. Sh404sef is a free extension but requires legacy mode to be activated in order to be installed and function correctly.
• JoomlaPack - JoomlaPack helps you to create a backup of your site (both files and database) that can be simply restored to another Joomla capable server. We don't need to tell you how important backing up your Joomla 1.5 site is! We really recommend downloading and installing this extension! JoomlaPack is free and is Joomla 1.5 native.
• JCE 1.5 - JCE 1.5 is the best Joomla 1.5 WYSIWYG editor that we have used. It is a considerable improvement on JCE for Joomla 1.0 and a huge improvement on the standard TinyMCE editor. JCE 1.5 is a free extensions and is Joomla 1.5 native.
• Xmap - Xmap creates both HTML and XML sitemaps seamlessly. When creating a sitemap you have the possibility to exclude content items where desired. The XML sitemap is useful for submitting to Google Sitemaps and adding to your robots.txt file. Xmap is free to download and is Joomla 1.5 native.

Regardless of what sort of website you are making, we are sure that these extensions will be useful.

What do you think, are these four extensions really the most important extensions to install on Joomla 1.5?

Click here to see the complete list of our favourite extensions for Joomla 1.5.

fuqaha May 04, 2008 Votes: +1	Agree. sh404sef however, still buggy for 1.5 (particularly on pagination). XMap, Joomlapack and JCE are certainly a must have. =) report abuse vote down vote up
David T May 04, 2008 Votes: +0	Fuqaha, have you tried the latest builds of sh404sef because the pagination issue was meant to be fixed with it? Yannick has also released a new native test version of sh404SEF (build 99): http://download.siliana.net/category.php?id=2 Please let us know how you get on with it if you try it out again. report abuse vote down vote up
shumisha May 06, 2008 Votes: +0	Hi David, Thanks for putting me up there. The latest test builds, in addition to being native, also have an option to make Joomla output its content table-less. Checked that out ? Rgds Yannick report abuse vote down vote up
Hummerbie May 06, 2008 Votes: +0	@David: I like the SEF Component from http://www.smartsef.org/ in combinatie with the SEF patch from Joomlatwork http://www.joomlatwork.com/pro....5rc4.html Both are free and work great for SEO and SEF on native Joomla 1.5. report abuse vote down vote up
Steve Moseley | Hannisdal Express May 06, 2008 Votes: +0	Shumisha, Wow? Is sh404SEF using some sort of overide to get it to be table-less? I know you can do this right now with template overides (and I know you posted some things about it on Joomla white paper areas). That is a great feature. Although I use it less now since my site uses suExec for PHP, JoomlaXplorer was GREAT to have for sites - especially for clients. report abuse vote down vote up
David T May 07, 2008 Votes: +0	Hi Yannick! Yes I have tried build 99 with the table-less output! It worked fine when I tried it with RocketThemes latest theme Catalyst. You've done really well to add it! Glad to see the other fixes it has too and the fact it's now native. Steve, Yannicks plugin uses the Beez template to output table-less. You can read more about the latest sh404sef release here: http://extensions.siliana.com/...pic=9034.0 Hummerbie, I agree both those tools are useful, but sh404sef gives you more meta data control than the SEF patch from Joomlatwork and in addition can add the h1 tags. That's why I use and recommend sh404sef over the other two plugins... report abuse vote down vote up

Email Name Website		smaller | bigger
		Subscribe via email (Registered users only) Add Comment