Beginning Joomla!® Web Site Development

Appendix C. Must-have Extensions

One of Joomla!'s greatest strengths is the abundance of extensions available to help your site perform almost any function you can think of. Need a social network? There's a component (or two or three) for that. Need a blog? It's covered. Need a document management system? No problem. A project management system? You've come to the right place. A photo gallery? Check.

You get the idea. The Joomla! framework is infinitely extensible to do anything you need, and many industrious individuals, groups, and companies have already taken the time to build some excellent extensions that anyone can download and use for free or a small fee. As you have already learned throughout this book, the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED) is the best place to look when hunting for extensions. It lists thousands of extensions in more than 200 categories. You can find the JED at http://extensions.joomla.org.

Commercial vs. Free Extensions

There are many advantages and disadvantages to using both commercial and free extensions. In many cases, there is a commercial extension and a free extension that perform basically the same function. You should decide on a case-by-case basis which extension is right for your website.

Commercial extensions are extensions for which you must pay a small fee to use on your site. Commercial extensions might be offered under a proprietary license, or they might be offered under the same open source license under which Joomla! is released, the GNU/GPL. ...