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02

May

2008

Joomla 1.5 extensions - 4 extensions your website needs
Written by David Towers   

The best Joomla 1.5 extensions 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.

12 Comments
0
fuqaha
May 04, 2008
Votes: +3

Agree.

sh404sef however, still buggy for 1.5 (particularly on pagination).

XMap, Joomlapack and JCE are certainly a must have.

=)

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David Towers
David T
May 05, 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.

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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

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Hummerbie
May 06, 2008
Votes: -1

@David: I like the SEF Component from http://www.smartsef.org/ in combinatie with the SEF patch from Joomlatwork
http://www.joomlatwork.com/products/free_products_for_joomla/joomlatwork_sef_patch_for_joomla_release_1.5rc4.html

Both are free and work great for SEO and SEF on native Joomla 1.5.

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Steve | Hannisdal Express
Steve Moseley | Hannisdal Express
May 07, 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.

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David Towers
David T
May 07, 2008
Votes: +1

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! smilies/smiley.gif

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...

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erichansa
August 19, 2008
Votes: +1

yes sh404sef!
once I made some mistakes with sh404sef. that made me a big mass.

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mil4o
October 30, 2008
Votes: +1

I am using all of them together on my website I just hope sh404sef get better. Maybe someone help me to make sef ext for xmap ?

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Jobannoncer
November 17, 2008
Votes: +0

Would like to test it out on my site where can i download?

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Ed
January 07, 2009
Votes: -1

Hi I use xmap it is good however it creates for some reason a link to each category that the articles are divided into. And depedning on the setting of the category view (number of articles listed) some pages cannot be viewed and google analyzes this an non found page. Is there i solution for this?

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joomla
April 05, 2009
Votes: -2

i like FCK Editor for editor joomla 1.5.x

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meenal
March 06, 2010
Votes: +0

I am using all of them together on my website I just hope sh404sef get better. Maybe someone help me to make sef ext for xmap ?

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