Compass Designs .net

One of the more exciting new releases for Joomla Joomla 1.5 recently has been K2 from Joomlaworks.

K2 is a content construction component, which lets you create custom content types (items) for your Joomla Joomla! website. With K2, build all sorts of different types of page: news, blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing etc.

I thought I wold take k2 for a spin in a "raw" Joomla video review. I installed K2 and put it through its paces without ever having used it before. Raw look, no reading documentation, just install it and play!

When we speak at events, or do Joomla Joomla Joomla training, one of the questions we get asked again and again is:

"What are your favorite Joomla extensions?"

There have been lots of people that have tried to answer this question, and its a hard one. One thing that I think makes it hard is the question isn't "what is the best extension?" That sort of question is really focusing on a particular scenario. The questioner perhaps means something like "what is the best comment extension?". The Joomla extension directory has lots of good information about this sort of question at the following pages:

• Most Favoured
• Editors' Picks
• Popular Extensions
• Most Rated
• Top Rated
• Most Reviewed

I think what people are really asking are "what are the best extensions that you find yourself using again and again on many sites?"

OK, so lets try and answer that question!

You may have noticed a couple of days ago, I added some new community/social networking features to compassdesigns.net - powered by Joomla Jomsocial. "What's the deal?" you might ask...

Over the last few months I have noticed more and more of my blog posts and presentations talking about community in some fashion. From presentations at the Denver CMS Expo about Building Online Communities, to Joomla tutorials about Building Online Communities with Joomla, trying to help build communities around charity organizations websites and musings on "are Online Communities the new Blogs?". I have even watched over the growth of two communities in my own businesses at Joomlashack and Joomla Simplweb.

This hasn't been an intentional path, but last week I really noticed it for the first time.

New versions of Jomcomment (3.0) and MyBlog (2.0) have been out a few weeks now. I have finally got my act together enough to upgrade.

There are a few nice feature additions, and it seems a bunch of bug fixing. You can find the full change log on Azrul's Member portal (which now seems to have been put on the back burner).

I decided to celebrate the fact my site did not implode on upgrading (it just took a few minutes) with a slight modification to the comment Joomla template. You can now have do follow links on your commenter name! Yummy text links for everyone!

Every now and again, you find an extensions for Joomla Joomla thats so simple and just does its job perfectly. No fuss or mess, it just works.

I recently was hunting around for a shoutbox, one of those little Ajax widgets where people can just type in comments and it appears. Kind of like a persistent chat.

Having a form on your website is incredibly useful. Its the easiest way to get information from your site visitors, which is critical for an interactive site. For such a useful and obvious extension, its always surprised me that there were not many options, and even fewer that work on 1.5.