Joomla has gained brilliant prestige in open source CMS development. There are heaps of 3rd-party modules and components in Joomla. For Joomla, I would rather say it is an application framework than open source CMS system.

In here, I would like to introduce some useful utilities for Joomla development. Actually the tools are also good for any website development.

Firefox

I don’t want to spend too much time introduce the open source website browser. There are at least 3 must-have plug-ins for Firefox:

1. Firebug

Good for Javascript debug, CSS preview and website structure analysis.

2. Fireshot

Sometimes we got a headache because you need to capture a screen shot of the website which is oversize in height. For a long time, I need to use window painter to join every single pieces of screenshot together to form a integrated website. With Fireshot, just fire it in one shot. Absolutely good tool.

3. Rainbow

This tool is quite useful if you need to get the color from the website (in hex decimal)

Just 3 tools? Hmm, for me, I think they are enough for the development. Of course you might need other tools to help you. In my opinion, not all tools are useful. But at least those 3 tools, especially Firebug could save you a lot of time if you need to deal with many HTML/CSS and javascript stuff.