There are a lot of components of joomla that make it a powerful open source CMS. The components are all good in there specific areas – so it would be very difficult to compare them to each other. So I am not comparing each other but just sharing my experience from them.

Here are the most useful components:

Virtuemart

Virtuemart is the complete e-commerce shopping cart solution for Joomla. You can handle an unlimited number of categories, products, orders, discounts and customers by its user friendly admin panel. I will never recommend this component to just make a simple e-commerce website. But when you are going to make an e-commerce website with some extra features such as blog, forum, gallery etc then I will highly recommend it. The reason for this is that the other e-commerce open source  software do not have the features of blog, forum etc. and if we add other such as Wordpress and PHPBB then user integration is a big challenge.

Community Builder

I do not have enough words to explain the necessity of this component. There is no professional webmaster who does not want to use it at least once in website. For the moment, this is the profile management system for joomla. You can add a lot of custom fields to your profiles. This component acts as a bridge between so many other components, allowing you to create a community site where members can share about themselves and interact with others.

Fireboard

The Fireboard is a well known meeting place where users can discuss their problems. If you need feedback, if you provide support – there is always a forum. Fireboard has all the features of a forum. In other words you can say Fireboard is the theme of social networking. It has clean coding as well as many other options and some templating.

FacileForms/BreezingForms

When I first saw facileforms I fell in love with it. The visual editing feature is amazing where you can manage your form in visual mode. The form element plugin system is great. You can easily manage form elements to make a form. It has 3 different options Quick Mode, Easy Mode and Classic Mode. Using quick mode you can create a good looking form in minutes. I would not recommend any other Form builder component other than “BreezingForms” for its simplicity.

JoomlaXplorer

JoomlaXplorer is a file manager within joomla interface. It allows you to edit files, delete, copy, rename, archive and unpack files/directories directly on your server. It is really good for quick changes so you don’t have to use your FTP client everytime. It is very helpful component when you do not have ftp information and going to make site live. I want to say thanks by this post to joomlaXplorer team to make such a useful component.

Xmap

Xmap is a Site map generator component for Joomla. It allows you to create a map of your site using the structure of your menus. There are a lot of plugins available for the most popular components such as VirtueMart, Fireboard, Mosets Tree and MyBlog etc. The best part of this component is that you can generate xml site map to submit google crawler.

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