The 10 best free and popular Joomla 2.5 extensions
Updated in Nov 2016
Have you found suitable Joomla extensions for your Joomla 2.5 site? Let's take a look at Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) which contains a number of extensions ready for Joomla 2.5. In this blog post, we will introduce you to some outstanding popular Joomla extensions based on the following criteria:
- High rating
- At least 50 votes from users
- Good reviews from users
- Supports Joomla 2.5.
If you are using Joomla 3.0, here is the list for you: Top 10 free Joomla 3.x extension
JCE - Editor
- Compatibility: Joomla 1.5, 2.5, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 370+
- Votes: 780+
JCE Toggled Editor
Whilst Joomla's built-in editor is limited to edit rich content, Joomla Content Editor (JCE) is truly a powerful WYSIWYG editor with many features. JCE includes advanced Image/Media, File and Link handling, plugin support, and an Administration interface for editor configuration. It meets your requirement to create any kind of content you want without needing to know HTML, XHTML, CSS, etc. You can create custom users or user profiles with your own image/file folders, editor layouts, buttons and plugin features. JCE makes content editing become fast, easy and convenient.
AllVideos - Video player
- Compatibility: Joomla 1.5, 2.5, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 200+
- Votes: 370+
Videos and Audios created by AllVideos
AllVideos is an incredible plugin for people who love sharing or uploading videos and audio. This all-in-one media management extension allows you to easily embed media hosted on popular services like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, SoundCloud (and many more) in your Joomla articles (or in other components such as K2, redShop, Virtuemart, etc.). You can create playback of almost any audio/video file format hosted on your server or even a remote server.
Read more: Joomla 2.5 video extension - Transform your site video library.
Mini FrontPage - Frontend News
- Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 80+
- Votes: 180+
MiniFrontpage
Mini FrontPage, one of the highest rated modules in JED, is a great option for you to show articles or news listings in headline style. The articles and news from preferred sections or categories are arranged with slide in/out or fade in/out effects, with pagination that depends on the amount of introductory text and the number of columns set in module parameters. You can also customize its view from various layouts.
DJ Image Slider - Image MooTools Slideshow
- Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 80+
- Votes: 100+
DJ Image Slider
DJ Image Slider, the product of the developer Design-Joomla.eu, is one of the best Joomla extensions, which allows you to display a gallery of your images with a title and short description linked to any menu item or url address. You can create categories for your slides or customize the interface in module parameters.
Art Sexy Lightbox Lite - Photo Gallery
- Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 80+
- Votes: 100+
Art Sexy Lightbox Lite
Art Sexy Lightbox Lite is another image slider tool. This is the free version of extremely popular Art Sexy Lightbox extension. With Art Sexy Lightbox Lite, it's easy to create an impressive gallery of pictures in different ways: displaying local photos or photo groups with fancy lightbox effects and 6 themes (black, white, new_black, new_white, spanish_black, spanish_white), customizing thumbnails, showing multiple galleries and much more.
JFusion - Authentication bridges
- Compatibility: Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.x, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 180+
- Votes: 320+
JFusion Component Control Panel
JFusion is a free GPL plugin for Joomla. That is an ultimate bridging solution, which helps connect Joomla to various applications with ease. You can use JFusion to integrate general users by extending the Joomla 2.5 user authentication framework without any core hacks.
JFusion includes some useful features such as search plugin, discussion bot and modules (login module, latest activity module, user activity module, who is online module). Moreover, JFusions supports quite a lot of frameworks: vBulletin 3.8.0, phpBB 3.0.x, MyBB 1.4, SMF 1.1.8, Wordpress and more.
Last but not least, the support for this extension is excellent as well.
AcyMailing Starter - Newsletter
- Compatibility: Joomla 1.5, and 2.5, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 330+
- Votes: 430+
AcyMailing
AcyMailing is a reliable newsletter and email marketing extension for Joomla. AcyMailing Starter is one of 4 different editions released: Starter, Essential, Business and Enterprise. AcyMailing is supposed to be an easy-to-use tool for you to efficiently manage subscriptions, newsletters and emails from your customers, maintaining good relationships with them. Besides, AcyMailing uses the Joomla MVC (Model-View-Controller) model to let you customize any view.
Only AcyMaling Starter edition is free for downloading, the others are not. Therefore, it has limited features and functions compared with the others. However, it is totally suited to individuals who have small-scale blogs or websites with a medium amount of visitors.
JDownloads - Download
- Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 100+
- Votes: 180+
JDownloads
JDownloads is an extensive download manager for Joomla with outstanding functionality. It is considered a powerful and excellent component by many users. With JDownloads, you can easily control downloads and uploads, permit or restrict downloading, also create categories, upload and insert files in articles, display them in modules and much more. There are many other impressive features: the automation feature, the available content plugin features, full ACL controls, etc. that you can discover gradually.
FLEXIcontent
- Compatibility: Joomla 2.5 & 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 110+
Flexicontent
FLEXIcontent is a great module to get a flexible control over your Joomla website content. It is an advanced content management system born to effectively enhance the native article manager of Joomla! (com_content). What I like most about this extension is its multi-state workflow which allows both editors & publishers to add/update content easily. It’s a must-try for content-heavy website. So, go to its website to look for even more powerful features.
JoomGallery - Photo Gallery
- Compatibility: Joomla 2.5 and 3.x
- License: GPLv2 or later
- Reviews: 140+
- Votes: 250+
JoomGallery - photo categories
JoomGallery is a gallery component completely integrated into Joomla, and now ready for Joomla 2.5. It has great features with many configurations to support creating unique galleries from categories. You have complete control over the design of your galleries via CSS-based layout, MVC structured code and template override.
In addition, the component supports various third-party extensions such as Community Builder, Community Builder Enhanced, JomSocial, Kunena, AlphaUserPoints, JComments, JomComment, XMap, sh404SEF, Artio JoomSEF, SEFAdvanced, JoomFish and reCaptcha.
In conclusion
Hopefully, you will find this article helpful for getting one or more great Joomla 2.5 extensions suitable for your websites. If you are satisfied with them, just visit JED to rate them and give your reviews.
However, please note that you are strongly recommended to upgrade from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.x. Joomla doesn't support this version anymore. All JSN extensions also don't support Joomla 2.5 so it's best for you to update to the latest Joomla version.
Last but not least, don't hesitate to leave your comments on this blog. We will really appreciate it.
