Joomla! Extensions
Sparks Arts offers a wide variety of extended functions that can be added to your basic Joomla! CMS setup for an additional fee.
We have researched through hundreds of available Joomla! extensions to hand-pick the best for your website. Select from the list below. If you don't see what you need, let us know and we'll find it for you!
WYSIWYG Text Editor: JCE
JCE is a WYSIWYG text editor that makes creating and editing Joomla content easy. Add a set of tools to your Joomla website that give you the power to create without needing to know or learn HTML or CSS.
JCE is so good we install it by default on every Joomla website we develop!
Free. Subscription for extra plugins - €25 for 12-month access to downloads and updates.
View my JCE video tutorials:
Automatic Site Maps: Xmap
Xmap allows you to create an automatic site map using the structure of your menus. Creates site map pages to display on your website as well as XML site feeds for Google and Yahoo search engines to keep them up-to-date on your latest changes.
Free
Shopping Cart
Online retail in both the U.S. and Western Europe is poised for serious growth, according to two new forecasts by Forrester Research Inc. U.S. online retail will grow at a 10% compound annual growth rate over the next 5 years to reach nearly $249 billion by 2014...
Website Magazine, May 2010
E-commerce isn't a trend but now a way of life. In the U.S. web shopping will account for 8% of total sales by 2014. More importantly, 53% of total retail sales in the U.S. will be influenced by e-commerce, as consumers increasingly use the internet to research products before purchasing.
Why not get your piece of the online sales pie?
VirtueMart is a full-featured e-commerce shopping cart solution for Joomla - used by thousands of store owners. It can be run in store or catalog mode. With its powerful Administration Tool you can handle an unlimited number of categories, products, orders, discounts, customers and shopper groups. If you sell numerous products, this is the shopping cart for you!
View my VirtueMart training videos:
Free
Blog Component: EasyBlog
My new blogging favorite for Joomla is EasyBlog by StackIdeas. I use it on this website and I'm still getting the feel for all that it can do. This is a relatively new component, but StackIdeas is constantly tweaking and improving it, so development is on-going. And support is quick and helpful. Features are robust and well-designed with everything you'd want from a blogging app. Read on for all the details...
Email Marketing - iContact and iContact Plugin
Although there are several Joomla! components that provide email marketing featues such as sign up forms, mailing list management, and creation/delivery of newsletters, Sparks Arts highly recommends using a professional 3rd party service. And our favorite of the many outside email marketing services is iContact. One of the top reasons I like it so much is the ability to design a custom email template rather than just selecting from the many designs they make available. I believe it is extremely important to carry your branding throughout all your marketing efforts - your website, business cards, advertisements and even your emails. That's more than just including your logo. It's your color scheme, fonts, and other graphics and designs. You can do that with iContact.
iContact provides a robust array of tools to create, send and track your email marketing campaigns. Try it FREE today!
iContact Plugin from Intellispire provides a smooth integration between your website and your iContact account to use email for marketing. With the iContact plugin, when someone creates a member account on your website they are automatically added to your iContact mailing list, instantly sycning the users information. One signup and they create a login account on your website and subscribe to your mailing list without any manual effort on your part.
Visit the Intellispire website for more information on the iContact Plugin for Joomla!.
$29 for iContact Plugin.
iContact email marketing account offers a free trial for 90 days, then monthly fee depends on number of subscribers.
Events Calendar: JCal Pro
JCal Pro is a W3C-validated events calendar component with a gorgeous, CSS-based front-end display.
$35 includes free updates for one year.
View my JCal Pro video tutorials:
Custom Forms: RSForm!Pro
RSForm!Pro creates custom Joomla contact forms. Ideal for non-programmers and programmers alike. It has built-in form layouts that you can use without any HTML or PHP knowledge. Notifications can be sent to administrators and to users, and each notification email can be highly customized.
19 Euros for one year membership with access to downloads, updates, and support.Video/Audio: AllVideos Plug-in
AllVideos is an all-in-one media management solution for Joomla. Easily embed videos hosted on popular services like YouTube, and Vimeo and many more inside your Joomla! articles or use it to playback almost any video/audio filetype directly from your server or a remote server!
You can, for example, use YouTube to upload your videos and then embed them inside your site without eating your server's bandwidth or having to spend money on expensive video conversion software! AllVideos will also take any type of video or audio file on your server and play it directly on your web page using simple tags.
Free
Google Maps
Googlemap plugin allows you to display one or more interactive Google Maps within your website content articles, modules or components. This plugin has a dizzying array of options. If Google Maps can do it, you can have that feature on your website. Map your business location with a marker, include contact information in a popup bubble complete with links and a photo, provide driving directions, pick the size your map displays, starting scale, view type (satellite, bird or street view, for example), and much more.
Free
Check out the demo by clicking the Read More link.
Weather Forecast
RokWeather is an Ajax-powered weather module which utilizes the Google API allowing you to easily display weather data and related information from regions all across the globe.
RokWeather includes options to display temperature, climate, wind speed as well as allowing the location to be searched by your website visitors for more personalized weather information.
Features
- Graphical Representation: the module is packaged with images to showcase all types of weather from rain to sunshine
- Location Chooser: click the current area and type your desired location and the module will show the appropriate weather
- Temperature Units: RokWeather has support for both the Fahrenheit and Celsius temperate scales
- Forecast: Up to 4 days worth of weather forecast
- Multiple Readings: optional parameters to show humidity, wind speed and weather descriptions
Shape5 Weather pulls XML data from Yahoo.com and displays the weather for the current day and the upcoming 2 days along with images depicting the type weather. You can enter a zip code in the administration side and also switch between celsius and farhenheit.
All Free
Click Read More link to see demos.
