How to Add Games to a Joomla Site

Video games have become an integral part of our modern-day culture. A variety of free online game applications have been developed for Joomla, the highly popular, award-winning Content Management System. Even though Joomla comes with loads of built-in functionality, there are literally thousands of free modules and components that you can use to expand this functionality even further. This CMS, for example, easily supports a huge library of games for downloading and publishing. With Joomla, you can easily add and manage a large number of flash games right at your website, providing some real interactivity with visitors to your site. Read on to learn how to add games to your Joomla website.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Browse the Internet to locate Joomla game extensions online. Popular game applications for Joomla include:
   *The dcsFlashGames Arcade, an online arcade management module;
   *The Joomla Flash Casino, which offers familiar casino games such as baccarat, craps, roulette, blackjack, Video Poker and even a slot machine game;
   *The Ulti Sudoku, another free, popular extension that is used for playing sudoku online and delivers a new sudoku puzzle to your website daily.
2. Make your selection and download the extension from the game's official or affiliate website to your PC. Extract the game if it comes in a compressed .zip format. Save the downloaded file to a folder that you can easily access later.
3. Log into your website's Joomla administrator panel. Navigate to the Installers menu. Click the Upload File and Install button in the Installers menu. On the menu that comes up, click the browse button.
4. Select the downloaded file of the game extension you want to install. Click the "Upload and install." Click "Continue" to complete the game's installation and you are done!

Tips & Warnings

• A Joomla game package often contains a component file, module file or a combination of the two. Before downloading a games package, be sure to note which types of files are contained within the game package so that you know how to install it. It is important to always remember this: As a rule, you should always install "component" files before you install the "module" files in any Joomla download.
• Verify that the game you choose to download is compatible with the version of Joomla that you have. Some, such as Ulti Sudoku are only developed for Joomla 1.5 and are not backward compatible to Joomla 1.5.