The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

The component is easy to configure and use. It is definitely more configurable and generally friendly than the built-in syndicator. While pretty much every Joomla component has an admin screen that similar to the View Articles screen built-in to Joomla, in this plugin it is particularly useful. While the feeds allow customization, all that is needed is a name and a section. The main admin screen contains the name as well as the URL for the feed. So, once you've created an URL, the admin screen is a reference every time you need to go back and copy a feed's URL. IMO, big win.

Would have gone for 5 stars if it had regexp or even keyword filtering on the articles.

I just can't rant enough about this extension. Instead of trying, I'll show some of my favorite uses. I have adopted the convention of using !!stuff!! as instead of the more Joomla-ish {stuff}. That way I don't need to worry about using a taken name or confusing any other code processes.

Some of my favorite uses:

1) Abbreviation: !!myco!! expands to "My Long Company Name". By convention !!MYCO!! expands to the same text with a link to my company.

2) Inline HTML: @@ expands to . I find them easy to remember because of their left/right position on the keyboard.

3) Put content in a side menu type in the Milkywhite theme: !!box2!!_Title_!!_CSS_Name_!!_Text_!!

_Title_ is the title for the box, the CSS name is incorporated into the CSS class & id of the box and the text is the contents of the box.

4) Create a button to link to an article:
!!btn-art!!_Art_ID_!!_Button_Text_!!

Art_ID is the article id of the article.

The twitter box is a good example. I know there are several Twitter extensions but, rather than figuring out which one has the features I need, I just put 440 characters of html and ReReplacer macros into a mod_php module and then add the module as other modules.

(Note, that I have a 2nd mod_php with some gross JavaScript Twitter has on their site. It is in a 2nd mod_php as it downloads JS from Twitter and I don't want my page to hang should it be slow loading.)

Just install it and type a few { tab=foo }, { tab=bar }, { /tabs } on your pages and it works. Download to working in under 10 minutes.

Since install I've probably reduced the number of articles by 20% so I can combine related content without huge pages or read-mores.

Goobs of CSS options. I guess if you are CSS-shy then this isn't as helpful. But the defaults are reasonable and you can add little changes over time. I started with the defaults, added some color on the selected tab to match the color of the topmenu in the Milkyway template. Etc...

And the price is tough to beat...