Unlike its CMS rival WordPress, creating a blog with Joomla can be quite challenging and frustrating task. But that doesn’t absolutely negate all the strengths that Joomla brings to the table as a CMS. Without turning this post into a debate over the Joomla merits versus WordPress – Joomla is indeed a powerful and mature CMS solution, which, however, proved to have some shortcoming – mostly in the way of a decent blogging system.
Not for nothing Joomla! is considered to be one of the most powerful and mature content management systems (CMS) out there. Providing all the necessary tools to drive success in one place – the platform has earned the love and loyalty of large communities all over the world. However, sometimes it comes under fire in regards to its usefulness as a blogging platform. Fortunately, like WordPress, Joomla has an active and thriving community of developers and enthusiasts creating plugins to expand its core capabilities. These plugins are collectively known as extensions, and they can easily be found in Joomla Extension Directory. If you’re looking to turn your Joomla website into a fully-functioning blog – the post aims to highlight some of the free extensions that can enhance your Joomla website with blogging functionality. So, without further ado, lets get started:
The Joomla Core
The Joomla core on its own has greatly improved for bloggers. The introduction of nested Categories means storing articles makes a lot more sense, and it’s much easier to manage content in the Administrator back end. When combined with an extensions like Komento, a full-blown basic blogging platform is ready to go.
K2
K2 is a content construction kit (CCK) that is often treated as one of the best Joomla extensions due to its easy customization and ability to add custom fields. Being packed with a gazillion of useful features that Joomla! lacks, it puts the platform a step forward in the context of other CMS options. Here are some points that make K2 unique:
- Easy-to-use for experts and non-techies alike.
- Ability to create as many templates as required and to assign them to various categories.
- Ability to create custom content types.
- Ton of very useful extensions available.
- Ans best of all… K2 is free!
ZOO
The ZOO extension makes its best by providing a quick and easy start to a blog, whether simple or complex. It comes with a bunch of nice features to play around with. To reflect that – the extension allows to add images with lightbox/overlay effects to your posts right from the ZOO admin panel. Additionally, it makes it quite easy to add different types of media to posts from the admin panel (youtube video example at the bottom of this post). One more useful feature is the ability to import Joomla articles into ZOO – in other words, if you want to take your existing Joomla articles and have them become blog posts with comments, you can do it in just a few clicks. Well, there is a paid version that has many more apps, but if all you need is the ability to blog on Joomla – then you’re all set with the free version.
Final Wrap Up
Just like WordPress or other platforms, a lot of Joomla’s power is derived from third-party extensions. Using the aforementioned extensions you’ll be able to add missing functionality and relatively easy turn your Joomla into a blogging powerhouse.
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Are there any noteworthy extensions that the post is missing? Please share in the comments section below!
