Top 10 ultimate Joomla extensions

“What does Joomla Extension do?”

Joomla! extension allows you to import users from CSV file to Joomla! user database and, vice versa, export users from Joomla! user database to CSV file. You can define your own rule and hence make User Sync to process virtually all kind of CSV file.
One of the hottest feature is the possibility of definition processing rule for any available user types including those which were installed by third-party component. You just need to define corresponding pair CSV User Group  Joomla! User Group and D4J User Sync Joomla! extension will do its job.
Besides of definition custom processing rule you can define series of other parameters such as fields termination symbol, fields enclosing symbol, etc. This can really expand the amount of CSV file types you are able to process.
And finally, you can filter users to be imported and exported by his/her user type, name, username and email. That allows you, for example, to generate a CSV file of all users from some system, but to import only users of Administrator group to Joomla.

As Joomla Extension speed-up the performance it is one of the most flexible and robust Content Management Systems available, it can suffer in the performance area. There are some common things that can be done to help speed your site up. While the best performance can be seen on a full dedicated server running Lighttpd (It’s MUCH faster than Apache) and a local MySQL database, acceptable performance levels can be achieved with almost any hosting package. For some administrators, upgrading to a dedicated server might not be practical…

Here are some way to improve performance

Template Optimization

We’ll start off this discussion with one of the most common (and most detrimental) problems that I have seen with Joomla (and any other site for that matter). There exist literally thousands of templates made specifically for Joomla, and most of them look quite nice, but most have some severe performance penalties. The problem is that some of the templates out there use upwards of 70 separate images to display the page. Each image generates a new request (which adds the network latency, usually between 0.1 seconds to as much as 1 second) and has to be downloaded. The problem is exacerbated when those images are not as small (in terms of data size) as possible, and when they are not optimized. There exists a GREAT site that will help you determine what template optimizations need to be done, make sure to run your site through it after ever major change.

All Components are not Good Components

If you look through the Joomla Extension directory, you’ll find a component to do everything you could want (for the most part).  The problem is that some of these components are REALLY inefficient and wind up slowing your site down dramatically.  If you want an easy way to identify slow components that you may be using, install my page caching component, but don’t enable caching (let it record the page load time for each URL).  Then after a week or so, go through the list that was generated, and find the slow URLS.  Those components will show you which ones are slower than the rest.  If you can, delete the ones that are really slow, and try another product.

Enable Caching as Much as Possible

If you can, enable Joomla’s core content cache. It does speed things up when viewing content and modules (mambots don’t need to be processed each time the page is loaded). If you really want to speed things up for unregistered users, take a look at my Page Caching component which caches entire pages. This is probably the best performance gain you can find you unregistered users (the majority of users for 95% of websites). This does not mean that you can forget about the rest of these optimizations, because the registered users will still see the uncached site.

Optimize your Database

The one thing that is put under the most strain in most Joomla installations is the Database server. There are two main ways to optimize the database. Optimize the tables, and optimize the schema. The difference, is that the tables are how the tables actually store the data, and the schema is how they are supposed to store the data. The schema only needs to be optimized once, while the tables need to be optimized regularly (as data is added, edited, and deleted). To optimize the schema, please refer to the article Improving Joomla’s Queries. To optimize the tables go into phpMyAdmin, select all tables, and click “optimize”.

Gzip, Sometimes

Encoding your pages with Gzip is an 90% solution… If your server’s processor is faster than your bandwidth (again, 90% of the time), than enabling Gzip compression will actually speed up your site. I say that because gzipping the pages does require some CPU horsepower. Try enabling Gzip and see if your site loads any faster (especially on highly loaded servers). If it doesn’t, or you get CPU warnings from your host, disable Gzip. It can hurt you, but most of the time it does help. The only way to find out is to try it.

Finally, Backup and Monitor Your Server

You MUST make regular backups, and move them off your production server. While you may be thinking “What does this have to do with performance?”, it has EVERYTHING to do with performance. Without current backups, how will you be able to restore the site to a known configuration if an install, update or tweak goes bad? A sudden slow down in the site could be from a hack attempt that injected malicious code into your core (unlikely, but possible). What happens if your server decides to bite the bullet? The best way to make the backups is with an automated script (so that you can’t “forget”). There are good ones all over the internet (and one’s probably included in your control panel if you have one), just google it. Remember, before doing anything to a site, BACKUP FIRST!

Top 10 list of extensions

1. JCE

   

2. Joomla Pack

   

3. JEvents

   

4. Expose Flash Gallery

   

5. Community Builder

   

6. Joom Fish!

   

7. DOCman

   

8. Virtue Mart

   

9. sh404SEF
   
   sh404SEF is must have extension that rewrites Joomla URL to a more user-friendly format (SEF URL or URL rewriting).
10. Xmap
    
    Xmap is a Site map generator component for Joomla.

Note : These two joomla components was included before in the list but due to courtesy of  Ogy Nikolic this list was fixed.The components are as follows:

1. Joomla Cloner

   

2. JCalPro

   

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Tagged as: joomla extension, joomla performance