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Ever considered using Joomla to power your organization's Web site? The Society of American Florists (SAF) is currently in the process of developing several Web sites based on the open-source content management system (CMS) and I'm inviting you to follow the process. You can click here to see how one of these Web sites looks like today -- this will change drastically over the course of the next few days. I'll provide a updates of what's going on as we update the Web site.
Firstly, what is Joomla? Check out more at the Joomla Web site. In essence, it's free software that allows your staff to easily publish content to the Web using a Web-based, "Word-like" interface. Joomla is continually developed by programmers who volunteer their time to improve the software. It's based on the programming language PHP, requires an MySQL database and usually runs on a Linux-based Web server, all also free, open-source products. Yeah for free.
The word "free" showed up much in the previous paragraph and is main reason why SAF continues to use Joomla. We just can't spend $40,000 to $100,000 (or more) a pop every time we want to develop a Web presence. And since we plan on expand
ing our presence in the next two years, leveraging this platform is a must. But take heed, although Joomla is "free" there is the expense in staff time to learn how to use it and deploy it using all the technologies I mentioned above. All in all, we've invested roughly three years of free staff time to learn open-source technologies.
If you already checked out the development site, that is what a default Joomla install looks like. Literally, we just created space on our Apache server, downloaded the Joomla software to our desktop, uploaded it to the Apache server and configured it. We'll move quick to secure the server but you can check out today what the admin login screen for the "backend" looks like by clicking here.
Prior to this point however, SAF did much planning on site navigation based on how Joomla is designed to manage content. Joomla likes for you to have top-level "sections" and then a second tier to these sections called "categories." This is a critically important discussion to have on staff considering the words and phrases you use to describe the sections and categories will be the Web site's keywords users will input to find you.
For this site, I'll build out the left menu that will be based on the sections/categories. These will be shortened to accommodate the limited space of the left-side column. However, when you click on the menu item, you'll see the expanded section/category within the bread crumb at the top of the middle column. Enough said for today. I'll get to work.
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