Web Design, Development and Marketing

Extensions
Out of the box, a CMS does a great job of managing the content needed to make your Web site sing. But for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in the application framework that makes it possible for developers all around the world to create powerful add-ons that are called Extensions. An Extension is used to add capabilities to Joomla! that do not exist in the base core code. Here are just some examples of the hundreds of available Extensions:

• Dynamic form builders
• Business or organizational directories
• Document management
• Image and multimedia galleries
• E-commerce and shopping cart engines
• Forums and chat software
• Calendars
• E-mail newsletters
• Data collection and reporting tools
• Banner advertising systems
• Paid subscription services
• and many, many, more

You can find more examples over at our ever growing Extensions Directory. Prepare to be amazed at the amount of exciting work produced by our active developer community!

Types of Extensions
There are five different types of extensions:

• Components
• Modules
• Templates
• Plugins
• Languages

You can read more about the specifics of these using the links in the Article Index - a Table of Contents - at the top right or by clicking on the "Next" link below.