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CMS extensions: where to find, how to choose?
No matter how long you keep a web site, if you update it frequently, holding a community, or taking care of it in any other way, at any moment idea of changing or improve its functionality may come to your mind.
If you are not a software developer then you have two options: find the developer that will do it for you or try to find extension for the CMS of your site that changes it in the way you want. But even for software developers that know enough about HTML, CSS, JavaScript and server technologies, reinventing the wheel by implementing the idea that is not unique (add CAPTCHA on registration form, for example) may be bad decision.
Even if you think that nobody did it before, it is a good idea to look for extension that close to the requirements. If you will be lucky and find it you save in a huge amount of time and money.
Here are several tips that will help you with searching the extension and make your site better:
- Extensions are not alway "extensions". Different communities have different names for them. For example, Drupal has "modules", Wordpress has "plugins". Some communities have two: Joomla has "components" and "modules".
- Start searching at the site of your site CMS. Most of them have a repository of the extensions on their sites.
- Pay attention to the latest release date of the extension and its version. It is a bad sign if it was updated last time a year ago.
- Some of the repositories track usage statistic, user rating and maintain a list of issues for the extensions. Check them too.
- If you know about upcoming major release of the CMS, check whether the extension maintainer claims that the extension will support it.
- Search for the reviews of the extension in blogs and forums.
- The functionality you are looking for may be a part of some more advanced extension. For example, email notifications about new users may be a functionality of "Advanced User Management Extension" and "Improved Notifications Extension".
Here is table with a summary of extension names and sources for some of the widely used CMS:
| CMS | What search for? | Where to find? | What to check? |
| Drupal | modules | http://drupal.org/project/modules | bug reports issue tracker usage statistic CVS repository |
| Wordpress | plugins | http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ | usage statistic user rating |
| Blogger | gadgets | http://www.google.com/ig/directory | usage statistic, user rating, comments |
| Joomla | components modules plugins | http://extensions.joomla.org/ | usage statistic, user rating, reviews |
| DotNetNuke | modules | http://www.snowcovered.com/ | user rating, comments, reviews, price |
Please note that all comments that look like "Thank you! This is exactly what I've looked for! You are THE GREAT! My site with flash games" will be immediately deleted without any compunction and your IP will be reported to mollom and added to the spamlists. Thank you for understanding.
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Nice idea, like that one ...
What a useful idea.
It'd be a great series to take one or two ideas (problems to solve) and then investigate how much you had to tweak each module/plugin to make it fit a CMS of your own making.
PaulG
jobs website
I am at We Kompare Jobs and I need to set up a blog. What software is the easiest to set up. I could use Drupal or Wordpress or even Joomla. I am being hosted on a Windows server.
Using Drupal, Wordpress or
Using Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla on Windows server is not a common practice, as I know. Linux is used more often with such systems. With Windows you can try http://orchardproject.net/ or something link this. Unfortunatelly, I'm not good with ASP.NET CMS. This site is created with Drupal and Debian but Wordpress is better for blogs.
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