We are firm believers that Joomla must be a very light product. We think that all useless extensions should be removed from Joomla. Yes, you heard that right, there are few extensions in Joomla that are useless and must be removed, and they are:
- Banners: If there is one extension that has been consistently used for a different purpose than the one that it has been originally created for, it would be the Banners extension. The Banners extension was originally created (back in the Mambo era) to display banner ads on a Joomla website, however it has been mainly used as a way to display images in modules, which means that a custom HTML module can do its job in most cases. For those very few who actually use the banners component as it was intended to be used, we have 2 words for them: “Google DoubleClick”.
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Messaging: This is probably the only Joomla extension that nobody has ever used or even tried to use except for fun. It allows you to send private messages to a user (a single user) from the backend. It doesn’t allow you to create groups and send mass messages to those users; you can only message one user at a time. Zero percent useful and one hundred percent bloatware – Joomla needs to get rid of it.
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Newsfeeds: It’s 2014 now and Joomla still has a component that retrieves RSS headlines from other websites to display on your own Joomla website. Even Google declared RSS to be dead a couple of years ago. Need we say more? Oh, and ironically, Joomla doesn’t even a built-in extension for RSS generation of the site’s content, so you can retrieve RSS headlines from other websites, but you cannot generate RSS headlines on your very own website (unless you use a 3rd party extension to do that).
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Redirect: This is an extension which power is only exceeded by its mystery (in case you’re wondering, that line is from the movie Dude – Where’s My Car). Its name is misleading as it doesn’t really do any redirect unless you hit a 404 page. Joomla administrators know little about it and aren’t that anxious to know more (let’s leave it mysterious, shall we, but in case you really want to know more about it, then we have discussed it, in details, here).
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Weblinks: 10 years ago (when Joomla was called Mambo), it was cool to create a page and to add links to other relevant websites. Not anymore. This practice is now the exception rather than the norm. If you really want to have a page where you can add your favorite websites, then just create a regular article and add those links to it.
According to Joomla’s roadmap, it seems that Joomla will get rid of most of the extensions above within a year or so. If you’re using one (or more) of these extensions and if you are interested in reducing your website’s dependencies on legacy code, then please contact us. We will provide you with an alternative solution and you won’t even notice any change on your website (we’ll ensure that the frontend still works the same)! Please note that our very affordable fees apply!