This week I’ve been delving into the world of Joomla once again after being asked to help a few societies develop their websites. Societies like groups often change and during this change, the transfer of information doesn’t always go smoothly. As a result, groups and societies end up with sites they don’t know how to manage or in many cases can’t access or update. 

My solution to this has always been a CMS ( Content Management System ) in my case wordpress, which is my number one choice for blogs and Joomla for pretty much everything else. Why? these CMS systems are well developed and have a large user community so solutions to problems are always just a quick search in a forum or Google and on top of that they are opensource projects.

Although these CMS systems are a great foundation, they do lack a few features that make them brilliant, but that’s where plug-ins or components come in, and today, I’m going to highlight 3 of the best components I’ve found for Joomla with regards to administration, especially in the back-end. 

N# 1 / Zoo : YooTheme

First of is Zoo, a component born only 2 weeks ago but has made it to the top of my list. Why?. This is the first component for Joomla that truly frees up the creation of content. Primarily a catalogue system, it’s structured design features a Content Construction Kit ( CCK ) which enables you to create you very own types of content. Out of the box it comes with the following content types:

• Article: This features, YooTheme’s Joomla template overrides. Included in the Lite Version.
• Product: Click to view an example
• Blog Classic: Click to view an example
• Download: Click to view an example

If none of these appeal to you and your a developer then you can create your own, by either mixing the pre-existing elements within Zoo ( e.g. forms, media, social networking ) or by programming your own. 

This component really makes light work of many tasks commonly done via hard coding Joomla or creating your own components or hacks for it. 

The only draw backs with the component at the moment is the lack of more content elements, but as time goes on, hopefully more will emerge produced by YooTheme or by third party developers. Secondly the price is quite steep, at $133 this is one of the most expensive components out there but to be fair, the feature set is quite large and the possibilities even greater. The licensing on the product isn’t clear but I hope they apply the Platinum style licensing that they employ with YooTools to help justify the price further.

N# 2 / eXtplorer

If your a Joomla admin and haven’t come across this component yet or like components for Joomla1.5 then I’m glad your on this site reading this post. In short, this component acts as a file management system from within your back-end and also features an FTP mode to save you diving into cPanel or starting up your ftp client. Some of the features include:

• Copy & Move Files and Directories by Drag&Drop
• Dynamic Directory Tree with on-demand loading of sub-directories
• Rename, Upload, Download Delete or Create new Files and Directories
• Access Files through FTP or directly (using PHP) to totally overcome permission and file ownership issues
• Create and Extract Archives (ZIP, Tar, Tar/GZ, Tar/BZ)
• User Management with different permission levels like “View only” or “Edit” and “Admin”

Unlike Zoo, this component is free to install and use so there really is no excuse to not have this component installed. This is by no means a replacement for your desktop FTP client, but for uploading images or small files onto your site, as well as general file admin, this component is spot on.

N# 3 / Adminpraise 2

Adminpriase is actually a template and not a component, however it qualifies as being as useful or as good in terms of back-end admin. This Joomla administration template restyles the back-end template, and offers a fresh alternative to the kephri default template. Allot of thought has gone into the template with regards to UI, but more importantly the function hasn’t been harmed, instead it’s also been improved. A shortcut dock, quick launches, tabbed interfaces as well as the ability to customise the back-end menu system, are all bundled in with this template. Add to that the 6 different themes, featuring Office2007, Apple, Wordpress and Google styled versions of the same template system.

At $60 this template is reasonably priced and will make day to day back-end work more interesting, faster and let you focus more on making sure the site your running is in good shape. My words can only go so far for this component, so have a play with the demo and let us know what you think of it. 

That concludes the first part of a 2 part look into Joomla components. Part 2 will feature components or extensions that help out on the front-end of the site and add value to the user experience, so stay tuned in for that.