By the first moment I started working on it, I felt surprised by how powerful and flexible Joomla can be. This open-source marvel is a top level CMS, far superior to many commercial products.

Of course Joomla is not a ready-to-use tool (like, let’s say, WordPress for blogging), but needs to be customized for the kind of site you’re going to deliver. The open-source community never leaves you alone in this, starting from the thousands of extensions available and fully supported on the official Joomla.org site. There are plenty of features for almost any purpose, including even the launch of a full e-commerce solution.

What I’m going to do here is simply to list the few extensions I strongly suggest, regardless of which is your Joomla-based project.

- Xmap: a very effective component, which builds and keeps updated both an HTML and an XML site map, useful for your visitors and necessary for search engines friendliness.

- J15html: it allows to create basic modules containing the html code you wrote or pasted in. Essential for publishing every tool or badge from external sites in the blink of an eye.

- JX Wysiwyg: an advanced what-you-see-is-what-you-get publishing tool, which gives you more options respect to the built-in Tiny MCE editor.

- Flickr Slideshow: whether you want to show a few simple images or a large photoalbum from Flickr, this smart component makes it simple and generates attractive layouts.

- YV Comment: yes, this is not exactly a must-have for every site. But today comments are often allowed even in environments quite different from blogs. Alternatively, a good option for comments might be also Disqus, a complete platform which is easy to embed within Joomla through a dedicated extension.

Every software product I mentioned is distributed for free under the GPL license. You can search and download any of them from the Joomla Extensions web site, which also provides an outstanding support through its community.