What Is a Joomla!® Extension?

We primarily use the Joomla!® open source Content Management software platform. Powerful and flexible websites can be built using Joomla "out of the box." The full power of Joomla is it can be easily extended or customized for the requirements of your web site. Joomla Extensions are software modules that "extend" or modify the behavior of the basic Joomla system. They range form simple additions or modifications to the basic content layout, for example placing a google ad inside your content to adding discussion forums, photo galleries, or even complete applications like e-commerce systems or job banks.

There are over 4,000 publicly available software extensions available,  some commercially available and most are free. Almost all are listed on the Joomla extensions directory.

There are often multiple choices of extension to perform similar functions.  There are many bookmarking extensions, e-commerce packages, discussion forums and so forth available. We have our list of favorite extensions that we use extensively for reasons of functionality, compatibility with each other, reliability and robustness and very importantly have a active developer community.