10 website-worthy sometimes-life-changing Joomla extensions (part 2)

6. PhocaGallery: Phoca is a killer photo extension that’s essentially free (a donation of $10-20 and a couple of days waiting time earns you the ability to remove the phoca logo).

• Phoca allows users of your website to create their own photo galleries, upload (and delete) photos to them from the front (and admin from front or back end) and add titles, captions and descriptions.
• Images are displayed on your pages and in pop-ip modals. Each image can have a caption and description.
• Users can comment on and rate other users’ photos.
• Admin can bulk upload photos.
• Admin has right to move, rename and organize all user images in the backend.
• Admin can set the style, size, layout, font style and size and behaviour of the galleries.
• The template of the galleries is light and simplistic in design, especially if you download one of the free default templates. Phoca uses categories to organize photos so you set different topics or subjects for the galleries. Each gallery can be assigned different permissions and a front end control panel can be enlisted by adding it to the menus.
• You can customize the appearance further using css.
• NOTE: Phoca’s depth of customization is a source of frustration for some. Its easy to kill the galleries’ design by changing the settings when you’re not sure what setting does what. You can save yourself by reading through the detailed tutorials on the Phoca site. They’re free and they explain every setting in detail, with screen captures (why don’t more developers user screen caps?!).

To get the most out of Phoca galleries, I would install Phoca and test a gallery with the default settings. Then read the tutorials from the phoca site and put aside lots of time to play.

Here’s what it looks like basically out of the box (I edited out faces and names in some cases, for privacy).

Comments and rating view of a phoca photo gallery

Another gallery view – 4 columns, bigger thumbs

Pop-up window view of an image

And if you really know your css (and a bit of php cod), you can completely change the look. Check it out…

Full photo view with some SWEET css mods!!

7. Master Password: One of my developers turned me on to this. It’s also not exciting unless you’re running a website that uses different permissions for different user types or gropus. With Master Password, you have a ‘master key’ to log in as anyone of your users and seeing your website the way they do. Use their username and your master password and you’re in. I use it for double checking that the right content is showing to the right people without needing to set up a multitude of fake, test user accounts (test registered, test author, test manager, etc) on my site. This is a time-saver for sure. NOTE: Choose a good, completely random master password. If you’re dumb enough to make your master password ‘password’ or ‘admin123’ then you deserve to be hacked. lol

8. JomSocial: if you want your own Facebook-style community, this extension will do the trick.

• Users have personal profiles with customized fields you’ve set up for them and ‘status’ fields they can update throughout the day – obviously feeling a lot like Facebook in almost every way.
• The template is well done and all the user interaction (dialogue boxes that pop up for messages and new friends, user email notifications and such) are finished and look good – despite a few typos and wrong tenses.
• There’s friends lists, an activity feed, photo galleries, ‘walls’, group/fan pages, video, discussion groups, private messaging that’s pretty much exactly like Facebook
• Front page of community shows latest members, photos, videos, and community activities (ie. ‘Jane just wrote on Jim’s wall’).
• Because JomSocial is so popular, many other extensions have written their code and modules to be compatible with JomSocial. For example if a user adds a review on a jReviews listing, it’ll show up on their feed. And the templates are also nice – right out of the box. If they author a Joomla article, that will also show up.
• BUT there are some issues that you need to be awere of (and okay with) before building a website or company plan around JomSocial.
• JomSocial needs more moderation capabilities from the point of view of a community administrator. There’s not near enough admin moderation capabilities. I can’t even view user’s profiles that aren’t my friends even though I’m the superadministrator. Not without looking them up in the backend. * March 05 2011 Update: Joomla has had oodles of updates since I wrote this article, so I thought only fair to note that the admin moderation capabilities with the most recent versions are greatly improved.
• The ‘HelloMe’ module in JomSocial has a TON of potential. I’ve had the hellome mod turned into a bar that runs across the top of the site and allows users to update their statuses directly within it, instead of having to go to the JomSocial section of the site.
• Azrul’s support can occasionally be pretty slow, and sometimes, non-existant (ie. I’ve received answers from support that were of no help).
• Azrul often apologizes for slow support, saying they’re swamped but with JomSocial billing out at $99 (standard edition) to $149 (pro edition which has no ”powered by” links and includes MyBlog for $1 right now) 50 per site and considering how many sites are using it, I don’t see why there’d be staffing issues. I’ve used it despite this just because I have developers to lend a hand in crisis and because JomSocial seems fairly indestructable so its not likely that I need support anyways.
• From a building-a-content-and-community-empire perspective, JomSocial can feel like its own not-so-little world. It’s one big chunk on your site, separate from your content and front page and there aren’t a ton of ways to integrate it into the rest of the site. For example I would like to have a latest photos and galleries module on my other site pages, not just in the community. JomSocial area has it’s own right column so adding modules in your Joomla left or right columns doesn’t blend visually as well as I’d like. I’d also like users to be redirected back to the front content page of my site when they log in but if you use the JomSocial login, you end up landing in the community main page instead – so you need to use Joomla core’s login.
• The privacy settings aren’t quite as straight-forward for users as I’d like. It seems to stump my site members and they end up posting galleries that noone can actually see. The only fix for this is to set privacy defaults to “everyone”. If you do this, though, make it obvious to users in your signup process that this is the case.
• All this aside, I don’t think I’d build an empire without JomSocial but I would like to set aside some time to make it look different from Facebook. I caught quite a bit of heat on one of my sites from users who “don’t want another facebook”. Implementing the Facebook Connect option helps with positive feedback.

9. Community Builder: This is another user profile, community-based extension that’s been around eons (which with software means a year or two) longer than JomSocial. Until two years ago, CB was your best bet for building a community into your website. Here’s what I like and don’t like about Community Builder.

• It’s been out longer and from what I’ve heard, it’s deemed to be secure.
• CB can be as big or as basic as you want it to be because it’s all about function. You determine what you want it to do.
• I’ve used Community Builder in a fundraising website in which I just wanted users to be able to join and set a few parameters, and then we’d be able to show off our members to say thanks to them for donating time, money or support. It took me about an hour to set it up using Community Builder.
• You can modify the template if you want it to be nicer.
• My favourite part is that, in contrast to JomSocial, Community Builder comes in parts basically. You have your users profiles – so you set up name, birthday, city, avatar pic, etc. And you have your user lists – you can place them anywhere and show them based on any number of requirement – such as all members in New York.
• The administrative moderation capabilities are WAY better than JomSocial. As an admin, you can see everything, delete whatever is inappropriate and so on. You can also set specific users to also moderate your community so that it’s not all up to the one superadmin account.
• It works seemlesly with Fireboard, which I assume means it also works with Kunena too (which has since replaced Fireboard).
• There are extensions specifically for CB to allow for photo galleries and walls and such. You determine what users to show according to what parameters you set up. Basically, it’s pretty slick on the building end of things and css or downloaded templates (many running from $10-$20) can take care of the rest.
• CB also says you can have your site looking like Facebook with some of their templates, if that’s what you’re looking for. I haven’t tried it myself.
• CB also has custom fields for everything. You just need a little practice to get the hang of it.
• I feel like I have more control over CB and how I can use it. Best of all, it’s stable and it’s free.

10. Kunena chat forums: Honestly, I like phpBB boards better than any other open source chat forum software, but they’re just not good enough at being integrated with Joomla core users and JomSocial or CB users. That said, Kunena is pretty damned good. I use it on two websites and have had no problems with anything. When Kunena was Fireboard, it conflicted with my Joomlart Ja_Trona template’s top drop-down menu/control panel. But on my current site (a seriously hacked version of Ja_Trona with NO drop-down control panel at the top), it’s been fine.

• Total admin moderation capabilities.
• Ability to elect certain users to moderate certain forums.
• Plenty of options and templates you can download to make it look good.
• Fairly user-friendly but my members still long for the phpBB days (I ran phpBB boards for 4 years). Kunena’s quick-reply and multitude of other user options for posting seem confusing for them, but they stopped complaining and started chatting after a couple of weeks.
• Seems pretty stable. Hasn’t died on me yet!
• Plays nicely with JomSocial and Joomla users core.
• Not a fan of the default template but it’s easy to customize.
• Did I mention it was free?

Kunena chat forums

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