Joomla! is also licensed under the GNU/GPL license, easy to install and administer and reliable. Joomla! doesn’t even require the user or administrator of the system to know HTML to operate it once it’s up and running…. but I do (just in case).

My plan is to expand the features and beef up the presentation. I’m expecting the learning curve is pretty steep (already about a week’s work invested), but so far it seems to be working well.

If you’ve read anything at all about Content Management Systems (CMS), you’ll probably know at least three things: CMS are a powerful way to do the web, CMS can be really, I mean really, complicated and lastly Portals are absolutely, outrageously, often unaffordably expensive.

Joomla! is set to change all that … Joomla! is different from the normal models for portal software. For a start, it’s not particularly complicated. Joomla! has been developed for regular folks in mind. They use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools that reminds me of Microsoft Word, and cool templates to chose from. Most importantly for me and Brockmann.com, it uses Cascading Style Sheets, a powerful W3Consortium technology that lets webmasters separate content from its presentation. That’s the power of the CSS technology – webmasters can modify the appearance of content without modifying the content.

• Completely database driven site engines
• News, products or services sections fully editable and manageable
• Topics sections can be added to by contributing authors
• Fully customisable layouts including left, center and right menu boxes
• Browser upload of images to your own library for use anywhere in the site
• Dynamic Forum/Poll/Voting booth for on-the-spot results
• Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX server, Solaris and AIX

Extensive Administration:

• Change order of objects including news, FAQs, articles etc.
• Random Newsflash generator
• Remote author submission module for News, Articles, FAQs and Links
• Object hierarchy – as many sections, departments, divisions and pages as you want
• Image library – store all your PNGs, PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, GIFs and JPEGs online for easy use
• Automatic Path-Finder. Place a picture and let Joomla! fix the link
• News feed manager. Choose from over 360 news feeds from around the world
• Archive manager. Put your old articles into cold storage rather than throw them out
• Email-a-friend and Print-format for every story and article
• In-line Text editor similar to Word Pad
• User editable look and feel
• Polls/Surveys – Now put a different one on each page
• Custom Page Modules. Download custom page modules to spice up your site
• Template Manager. Download templates and implement them in seconds
• Layout preview. See how it looks before going live
• Banner manager. Make money out of your site