If you are interested in visualizing networks on your Joomla website (such as social networks, computers, biological systems, clusters in business groups or industries, etc.), you should look into NodeXL, an impressive open source and free program.
NodeXL is used to visualize and analyze networks and is being developed for a larger audience than those of the more complicated and sometimes obscure scientific social network packages. It has been developed by Microsoft Research and a group of universities. While many other social network programs are difficult to learn and provide poor visualization, NodeXL generates amazing graphs and works directly out of the box if you have Excel 2007 installed on your computer.
NodeXL is basically a template for Excel 2007 (it does not work in openoffice) that adds extra functionality to Excel. The developers deliberately used Excel as a platform because many people are familiar with Excel which lowers the learning curve substantially.
You can easily customize the graph’s appearance; zoom, scale and pan the graph; dynamically filter vertices and edges; alter the graph’s layout; find clusters of related vertices; and calculate a set of graph metrics.
Below are examples of NodeXL graphs with different ...
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Projects and organizations often need to report to clients on progress indicators as part of the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) requirements. Amchart is an excellent tool to include an indicator page in your Joomla empowered website. Below is a list of graphs provided by Amchart, each with their individual xml data and settings files. The data files can be easily maintained by field staff. We also added an upload facility so data files can be uploaded for each graph individually by authorized users - this is especially useful when data needs to be updated and FTP is not an appropriate method.
Not everyone has access to fast Internet. In many developing countries, Internet is provided through slow satellite links. We managed to improve access to Joomla sites dramatically in terms of speed by using the following settings and guidelines:
In addition to AmMap, a useful plugin to generate maps combined with KMZ and KML files is the "Plugin Googlemaps" in the JED. This plug-in produces the well-known maps with the Google Map API. Below is an example of a map that contains a route that was recorded with a Garmin handheld GPS.
Joomla has many plug-ins, modules and components that are based on the Google Map API. Although they are powerful and very useful, they often look pretty much the same and everyone with a map on their websites is using them. To make your site more special, we recommend that you use AmMap, an interactive flash map 
Ever wondered how to export a copy of your Joomla site hosted by a hosting company to a home computer? The following practical steps will produce an identical copy of the site on your home computer.
Setting up a Joomla website is not as time consuming as many people think. Based on our experience, we have developed a checklist to install and develop a new website for clients.