When I mentioned in my Picks that we deployed Joomla to drive this year’s Gnomedex site, a Gnomie responded enthusiastically. Jack Bremer operates a handful of Joomla-driven sites, including Prospect Burma and his own 3B Web Design. John and I have been hacking away at it for a while now, but he definitely knows more about the platform than I do – and John offered a handful of tips and suggestions, including his top five “must have” Joomla extensions. From the Bremer’s mouth:

• Joomap (sitemap generator – great for your site AND automatic Google sitemap in the background)
• JCE Editor (& file manager plugin & image manager plugin) – GREAT WYSIWYG editor, a million times better than the standard Joomla editor (I always unpublish the font and style plugins if other people will be managing the site so they cannot screw up the layout of the site!)
• Google Analytics Plugin – obvious really!
• CorrectPNG – IE6 PNG mambot/plugin which allows transparency (although not in png’s called in by CSS)
• Google Maps Mambot (if appropriate) – fantastic map plugin which makes adding maps SUPER easy.

He added: “If OpenSEF is problematic, Artio JoomSEF is far easier to setup, I just like the control I have with OpenSEF. I recommend never using “static content” and instead publishing a “General content” or similar category in which you put general info – it’s far easier to manage through a single content manager than having some things in static etc.”

I wonder how else we could pimp my Joomla? Ewwwwwww…

Five must-have Joomla plugins (and tips)