What Joomla Components do you need?

I have been helping a friend create a Web 2.0 style site called Tea Australia (site will be unlocked when we have finished)

He has come up with a list of fucntionality that he needs the site to provide and so I have been trawling the land of Joomla Extensions to see what fits and more importantly works.


The list so far (will be updated as I complete my research of course):


1) Ads on the page – both Adwords and also custom images that people can pay directly to.

For the adwords requirement there are a large number of Google Adwords based module avaliable.  These include:

  • ??

We eventually went with ??? because ???

For the directly hosted ads there are a couple of banner/advertising based extensions such as:

But I always recomend using OpenAds for this capability as it has a robust reporting and monitoring capability.  Its easy enough to include the code to invoke the openads as a module, although there are a few gotcha's in getting this to work but once you are over the "tricks for young players"you are away laughing.

2) Ability to bring up video from places like youtube.com


3) Ability for bringing up RSS feeds



4)Tea rating system – people can list and score their favourite type of tea


5)Café/Restaurant rating system – people can list and score their favourite café/restaurant that sells tea



6)Tea blog – people can rant their favourite thoughts on tea


7)Online Chat


8)Special editorials – I want to request people in the industry to write on the site


9)Share pics – people can share their pics of tea on the site

There are a large number of Gallery extensions available for Joomla. They are broken down into three categories:
  1. Gallery Bridges
    These link standalone gallery applications with Joomla
  2. Joomla Components
    These are full gallery applications embeeded within Joomla as components
  3. Slide Shows
    These are components where you point to a direcotry or directories and it display the contants as a gallery
The bridges enable you to use the highly functional gallery applications but the integration is often a little cumbersome.  The components are fully integrated but often limited in functionality.

Gallery components include:
  • RSGallery2

  • Expose Gallery
  • Joomnik Gallery
  • Zoom Media Gallery
    This Gallery Component has been around for a while (orginating as a Mambo Component) and even though it is still in Release Content (RC) stage it is still the most functional gallery component on the market.

    A raft of addon modules and mambots also add value

    Only downside is it is still rather buggy and a little difficult to use

The Winner - zOOM Gallery

In the end we had a key requirement to allow users to upload images via the Joomal front end site and Zoom Gallery was the only gallery that seemed to enable this.


10)Share tea recipes


11)Send Tea greeting cards

Seems only  one eCard extensions exists:
The Winner - RWCards

DOH! Not much chioce really.

Interestingly zOOm Media Gallery allows users to send gallery images as eCards but we have used RWcards as well to give the users a dedicated eCard capability.


Note

Luckily we decided to go witht he current release 1.0.12 of Joomla as all the mods are designed to primarily work woth Joomla 1.0.x.

We have started doing a lot of work in the Joomla 1.5.x beta's and using the extensions in the beta are very hit and miss to say the least!



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