The way I, and well… pretty much every Joomla! web developer I know locally figures it, JCE (Joomla! Content Editor) is at the top of the “must install list” when developing a new website.

The standard article editor TinyMCE never made the cut for me. In fact, when I first encountered TinyMCE three to four years ago, it at times caused me to contemplate my career choice on regular intervals as I attempted to understand the blasted foreign system. Image upload/editing/publishing was lacking functionality and usability, and was a general complete pain in the ass, not to mention there were limited ways to insert other media such as flash and video, let alone upload and insert supporting documents in an article. This is especially the case when you use an editor that strips embed tags and JavaScript when you click save.

Linking to articles/sections/categories through the editor was the equivalent of slowly scrapping your face against a brick wall – it felt like a painful, pointless exercise.

Look. Don’t get me wrong, despite the harsh criticism. TinyMCE is Open Source, meaning I didn’t pay a cent, attend planning meetings or spend hours awake late at night trying to fix bugs while huffing coffee beans to stay coherent. Beggars can’t be chooses, and well, if my php coding ability was keeping the ice caps from melting, we would all be under 10ft of cold water by now. Also dead.

It does happen to have some great WYSIWYG editing ability, which is why you can find it in countless different web applications. But perhaps thats the issue. It wasn't designed just for Joomla!, and therefore lacked the functions truely required. Regardless though, no matter how much I tried to love it, it always felt like things could be done that extra notch better in the usability or functionality department.

But that is where JCE came in. It fixed so many of my niggling annoyances with the TinyMCE editor and was also FREE. Compare to TinyMCE, the image manager was fantastically simple, linking was a breeze and it all worked smoothly (including installation).

However, as time goes on, a new list of required features is gathered. So over the past year, after building some really complex websites, I along with the Alltraders team looked at further third-party plugins to complement the powerful JCE. However, I wish I hadn’t somehow overlooked these following plugins available for a onetime cost of US $30.

So what are these magical plugins that left me speechless? 

Image Manager Extended
Resize, rotate and create thumbnail images before and after they are uploaded. Also, create image popups using the optional JCE MediaBox plugin or Slimbox / Lightbox and Thickbox, or browser window popups.

Media Manager
Upload and insert media file types such as Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media and divx. That said, if you link to a YouTube URL, it automatically inserts the video! Check out my article talking about latest Dima Music releases as an example. Flv files can be inserted and embedded with the bundled flv player. 

File Manager
Upload and insert very clean and professional links to various supporting document types into articles, such as pdf, doc and txt. There is the option to display the file type icon, modified date and file size next to the link.

Captions
Create captions for images with border, colour and text options. This is a great way to increase your SEO by having text that relates to your image, close to it.

So in-case you are left wondering after reading the above; Yes. These extensions now have found themselves a permanent home on my “must install on all new Joomla! 1.5 websites” list.

As so they should with your own list.