Joomla! is powerful from the first install, from a designer's point of view. The overrides allow customization of any extension using the MVC (model-view-controller) framework which means one can easily add overrides to the template folder instead of hacking the extension files only to get it overwritten during upgrades.

That said, the content organization in Joomla 1.5 is somewhat limited. You can't add an article or module within another article or module which sometimes restricts the way you want to display things on your site. One could argue that having a site organized properly from the get go would get you all the flexibility you want but then, you might not have that option when you are taking over an already established site.

This is where NoNumber extensions come into play. And such a big role they play in getting the job done. Peter van Westen has done a great job in finding just the perfect way to add that flexibility. With Articles Anywhere and Modules Anywhere you do exactly as the name says...add articles and modules anywhere in the site. You can add articles and/or modules within articles, modules, section descriptions, category descriptions, just anywhere!

Case Study:

Website has three distinct categories but articles that cross populate the categories.

To achieve that without Articles Anywhere you would need to duplicate content so the articles appear in category blog layout or list under each category. That would defeat the purpose of quick updates if one of the articles got changed as the same changes would have to be implemented on more than 1 article.

You can solve the problem with Articles Anywhere in many different ways:

1 - Create the 3 necessary categories that have cross populating articles as well as an extra category (you can call it General, CrossPostings, whatever you like and that makes sense) to store the articles that will be cross posted to 2 or more categories. Create the articles as needed. Then within the main Category's description field insert the cross populating articles in the required order. Create a link to the category either as blog post or list depending on how you want the articles to appear. This will show the cross posting article above the articles saved to each category. It also means that any new articles saved to the regular categories are displayed automatically in blog or list layout.

2- Another option would be to use only articles by creating all the articles, cross posting or not, as you would regularly plus one article for each “category”. Then within each “category” article you can insert the cross-posted articles as well as the other articles in the required order. This option would mean that you would need to insert any new articles to the “category” articles manually.

There are possibly other ways to solve this specific problem but these would suffice. The many uses of these two extensions will blow your mind :) They are all well documented and NoNumber also has a great forum if you are looking for ways around difficulties implementing them the way you want.

Peter is an extremely prolific programmer and always looking to improve his extensions. Although all his extensions are free and GPL, his commercial licensing helps support the extensions' development so I recommend licensing whenever possible. 

Keep them coming Peter!!