Following on from my post 2 weeks ago, I’m back to feature 3 more components for Joomla, this time focusing on components that contribute to a better front-end experience.  Although Joomla is a great CMS, many Joomla sites are not well equipped or designed to show a range of media, for example videos, photo galleries , forums and blogs.

As a result people make do with what they have, so they’ll use third party sites or components as a work around. Unless it’s done well, this often leads to sites not being uniform in design or more cluttered as well as taking longer to load. If your a developer then you could always code your own mods for Joomla but for those who shy away from the code, components and extensions are the way forward. 

If you shy away from code, or just don’t like the look of it then read on.If you like the look of code then read on anyway, the following could save you some time.

Kunena: Forum Component for Joomla

First up is Kunena, born from ”a fork of the former Fireboard forum with a new team and some of the previous developers, including several Joomla core developers”. So what exactly does it do? in short, its a native Joomla forum component which enables you to run your own community forum within Joomla without having to employ a third party bit of kit like phBB. 

The advantages of it being native to Joomla is that it integrates with the core system and other components already installed. It also has Community Board integration currently being developed  which will enhance its features with regards to user management.

The back-end administration is very robust and takes some time to setup but this offers users the ability to fully customise the component with regards to the design and how it appears to front end users as well as the way it works an integrates with Joomla. 

Most importantly this component is in its early days and with some Joomla core developers in on the project, things can only get better.

Community Builder:  Building Communities

Community builder is hard to describe because it does several things:

• It manages users on your Joomla site including a more beefed up registration system. 
• The ability to build, maintain and administer online communities.
• A base from which other components like Kunena can work from and integrate. 

Having said all that, we could summarise community builder as a must have component if you intend to use Joomla to run an online community, whether its for a university society, sports team or gaming site.  The configuration of the component and the corresponding modules will take a little getting used to and setup is very straightforward but slightly lengthy process. However once set, the component does the rest. Like Kunena it’s also a free component with a large user community so modifications, problems and fixes are just a few searches away. 

The component comes into its element in the front end, creating viewable profiles for each user which is again fully customisable. Add to this the chat feature enabled within the component and the vast modules, extensions and plugins available for the component on the Joomla Extension page. Put all those ingredients into a box, shake, and you have a very powerful component for the great price of $FREE.

Make sure you download, install and properly play with the features this component has to offer. Its almost a standard in the Joomla world so don’t miss out, and while your there, check out the other Joomlapolis releases.

eXpose: Beautiful pictures and now video too!

Last but not least is a component of a different kind, Images in Joomla have always kind of been a pain in the neck, unless your using the JCEditor plugin, adding images can be a pain involving a rather fragmented work-flow, showing multiple images in an aesthetic, yet resourceful manner is even harder. I first resorted to Slideshowpro.net which did the job marvelously but it meant playing around with loads of settings in both Joomla and slideshowpro. Don’t get me wrong, Slideshowpro is a great bit of kit but when I’m doing Joomla admin, that’s where i like to stay. I also like to keep things $FREE which slideshowpro wasn’t so I was relieved to find eXpose, a flash image gallery component for Joomla.

The back-end side of things is again, very customisable with the ability to change the look and feel of the galleries. Front-side you get a neat flash gallery optimised for viewing photos whatever the quantity. It’s not miles better than something like slideshowpro but keeping in mind the open-source nature of Joomla and the fairly basic demands of a component like eXpose, this component scores highly. Note that I haven’t include many images for this component as i leave it for you to download and try out. 

That concludes Part 2 of this series. Although i said it would be the last, I’ve had a few emails with more components to include so look out for the last part of this series in the coming weeks.