Ten New Joomla Extensions Worth Trying

Earlier this week, Joomla announced that it had surpassed 30 million downloads in its brief but, many would say, brilliant history. That's about 8 million downloads in the past year alone for an impressive 40-percent adoption rate since the end of March 2011.

Among the biggest factors behind Joomla's increasing popularity and rapid growth is the talented community of developers that has produced more than 2,000 new Joomla extensions in that time period. There are now more than 9,200 Joomla extensions overall, but the past few months have been particularly memorable in terms of both production and quality.

So, to celebrate the open-source content management system's recent milestone, below is a list of 10 recently released Joomla extensions that you may not have had the opportunity to try yet:

CSS3 Image Hover Module
Added in March 2012, the module will add a CSS3 animated hover effect over an image. Simply roll over your image to reveal a title, some text and a link. With six transition styles to pick from, a color chooser and fields to enter your title, info and link, this module can be used in almost any situation to add some flair to your images.

JoomDalf
Also added less than a month ago, this magic tool is earning rave reviews right out of the gates from users. JoomDalf works with all WYSIWYG Editors in Joomla to insert column layouts, tabs, accordians, togglers, videos, buttons and just about anything else you would want on your site. Regardless of what template you use, JoomDalf can enhance your layout without any coding and just one click of a button and some simple forms to fill in.

RS Media Gallery
Added in late February 2012, this new extension lets you upload, edit and publish your pictures easily. Create galleries, modify them on the fly and publish them on your website as a collection of images, a theatre or simply as a presentation slider. Dynamic AJAX filters can be used to select the images you want to work with. Images can be published, tagged, moved and removed with no more loading times, no more refreshing the page, and all on one screen.

Josetta
Added in March 2012, Josetta is a multilingual content manager for Joomla 2.5+, designed for ease of use, forward compatibility and performance. This extension facilitates the translation of existing Joomla content in several languages by one or more translators with little or no knowledge of Joomla. Translators can easily monitor items that have already been translated and those that have not.

Form Maker
Just added on Leap Day, this form making extension allows users to set all the parameters such as colors and fonts. The size of each element of the form can be set as well, and the back end interface is intuitive and user-friendly, even for those without any scripting and programming experience.

Complete Image Styles
Added in March 2012, this extension provides a full collection of styles for images and brings together all the standard and new styles that appeared with the growth of CSS. Styles like border, shadow, rounded corners, frame, embossed, perspective, lifted corners, raised box, cutout, glowing, reflection, curves, captions and others can be applied alone or in combination.

J2Store
Also added on February 29, this shopping cart for Joomla integrates with the Article Manager and provides a facility to upload your digital products like PDFs so that users can offer these files for a price. You can now sell PDFs, images, music files and more with your own Joomla store.

jQuery Easy
Added in October 2011, this extension is meant to clean and prepare the front and back ends for the use of jQuery alongside the Mootools libraries. There is no need to add code into the template or screw around with the Joomla core, simply a quick and easy plugin for using jQuery on your Joomla site without any conflicts.

Code7 Responsive Accordion Module
Speaking of jQuery, this modern responsive jQuery extension was added in March 2012 to display articles in a responsive and good looking module. Loads in jQuery with no conflict, displays articles from selected categories and can limit the amount of articles.

Smart Slider
Also added in October 2011 and just recently updated, this is considered by many to be the perfect slider extension for Joomla. Features and capabilities include frontpage slideshow, image slider, image gallery, carousel gallery, content slider/tabs, highlighted content, banner slider, vertical and horizontal accordion sliders, product slideshow, FAQ box and much more.