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We are traditional print publishers, publishing our own titles of wedding and parenting magazines plus contract publishing for clients. A small company of five aimed at niche markets.

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To complement our printed titles plus ensure we have fresh content between publication dates.

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We had a good basic HTML website that was OK for the time and was well used, but we realized the Web was changing, and we needed to provide a better and more modern presence.

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To take advantage of Content Management System (CMS) to keep track of a rapidly growing website and avoid trying to link about 1000 static HTML web pages. A friend recommended it, and I remember recoiling in horror when he showed me the backend, etc. and thinking there was no way I had room left in my brain for another software learning curve.

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We have experimented with most of the commercial add-ons but mainly use

Joomcloner

Simple Pro gallery

Docman

Mosets Tree

Front page slideshow

JomComment

Letterman

WYSIWYGPro

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I found it hard at first with the menu structure and its relationship with modules.

The overall management of the CMS is great, ability to use a subscriber newsletter function from within site, the ability to change templates fairly easily; a great feature of Joomla overall is that it seems to be maturing in terms of well supported availability of templates/components and other add-ons.

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We update the site(s) more regularly; we are now more confident with using and updating and improving our site as it is just simpler to do it from the backend in real time. We don’t dread updates like we used to.

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As a print publisher, I remember thinking that the last thing I wanted to do was change the way we did things—i.e., we had perfected our print production/workflow for CMYK printed material. Then the Web came along and demanded new ways of working. (At the early stage, I agreed with Homer Simpson when he said, “The Internet? Is that thing still around?”)

It is now a vital component of our business. I doubt our two wedding magazines would have survived without our early adoption of this new medium and our integration of print/Web. (Interesting some of the big print publishers are now playing catch-up as they denied this new medium and just tried to protect the print side of their business)

Joomla, with its great array of add-ons, has allowed us to take the lead in giving our clients (advertisers) a great website to promote their business and link to them. It gives us a tidy way of controlling our pages in a database-driven site and manages our data and design as separate beasts.

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The City of Longwood is a municipality in Florida with 14,000 residents and 150 employees.

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We aim to keep citizens informed of official business, provide contact information, an events calendar, and other various local information.

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We had an outdated site that was difficult to update and poorly designed.

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The open source concept appealed to the City Commission, and price was less than for proprietary options.

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WYSIWYGPro

PHP Auction

DocMan

Thyme 1.3

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The most difficult part in the beginning was figuring out the program structure, but after a few months of working with it, things became quite clear. By far the best feature of Joomla is the ease of updating pages once the site has been built.

After the initial training for myself and staff, several departments worked together to initiate a plan to build content for the site. This process was very dynamic in that each department could work simultaneously on their particular pages, and I could do final editing and layout once they were finished.

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Joomla has enabled several people within the organization to maintain their own pages. It has also provided a much more comprehensive way for the City to share documents, photos, and other materials with the public. It has not changed our Web goals, but it has certainly enhanced them.

Joomla has also provided great improvements to how we inform the public through the Thyme 1.3 calendar component. I should also mention, the auction site the City was able to implement through PHP Auction allows us to sell surplus items to willing buyers. These are all great improvements to the way Longwood uses its website to achieve its ultimate goal of connecting with and providing information for the public.

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Joomla has firmly established our Web presence through robustness and design. Furthermore, commercial Joomla developers greatly assisted the City in achieving this goal through dedicated support, a sleek design, and valuable industry knowledge.

Joomla is truly a powerful competitor in the world of CMS, and that has been proven once again through this project. Key to creating the City’s website has been the user-friendly features of Joomla, a dedicated city staff, and the quality of professional Joomla third-party companies.

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Royal Oak Public Library (www.ropl.org) is a public library in metro Detroit serving 60,000 residents. We have about 112,500 books and audio-visual materials in our collection. We provide 36 computers for public use. We receive about 1200 hits to our website every day.

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Our goal for our web presence is to convey current and updated information about programs and events at our library, book reviews and recommendations, a portal for research databases and a seamless transition to our collection catalog.

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Prior to using Joomla, our website was comprised of basic HTML and tables and nearly every page had a different look and feel to it. This included the layout, color scheme, and font attributes. One person was designated to add content.

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We decided to use Joomla because we were fascinated with the flexibility, usability, third-party extensions, and ability to have all our staff members add content when they want.

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Attend Events (program registration)

Bookmarks (portal for research database)

Extended Menu (menu structure and pathway)

FacileForms (advanced forms)

Fireboard (forum)

JCal Pro (calendar)

JCE (WYSIWYG editor)

Jom Comment (allow for public comments on content)

Jombackup (daily, automatic backup of Joomla database)

MyContent (allows staff to add content to website without admin privileges)

Opening Times (flexible display of hours of operation)

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We struggled with how to organize our Sections and Categories to form our navigation menus. This wasn’t due to Joomla, though. What is a limit in Joomla is the ability for staff members to add images/media to the content that they publish with the third-party extension, MyContent. Joomla requires someone with admin privileges to upload images/media to their web server before another staff member can display it in their content.

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Joomla has allowed all staff members to add content in a blog format to our website easily. It has freed up our webmaster to concentrate on other performance and design issues. We now accept online registration for programs that require it, online volunteer forms and comments on content from visitors. Joomla helped us realize what our web goals should be. One week of playing with Joomla and you’ll be amazed at what you can do with it.

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Our web goals have been met by having flexible content be displayed on our website without much management. Our programs and events are displayed and removed automatically, we can keep track of the usage of our research databases and some visitors to the website have left comments on content which opens up communication between them and our staff.

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Telx provides an interconnect facility to, primarily, the telecommunications industry.

Each customer is provided a panel in our “Meet Me Rooms” so they can quickly and cheaply cross connect with other companies. We are carrier-neutral.

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To provide industry-related news and trends within our industry as well as company information.

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Static XHTML pages

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We needed to create a WEB 2.0 site with a sophisticated CMS system on a very small budget. Joomla fit these requirements perfectly.

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Docman (Extended Menu)

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Adding links to content on other sites. Cross Browser Style Sheets

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We no longer need a dedicated individual to handle site updates. Now each department is in charge of updating their own content.

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The CMS and templating has enabled us to keep the format of our site intact as we add and edit content.

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NZMac.com is a website owned and operated by Philip Roy and dedicated to supporting the New Zealand Macintosh community. It includes the latest New Zealand Macintosh news, discussion forums, international news and reviews. NZ Mac events, businesses, user groups, and Mac items for sale are all featured on the site.

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Mac users worldwide are an enthusiastic and obsessive bunch of people. With NZMac.com, the focus is specifically on developing a sense of community within New Zealand and the Macintosh user base. Although the site is owned by Philip Roy, many facets of the site are developed through consensus and through gauging the needs of sites users. It is hoped that NZ Mac users, User Groups, companies, and institutions will take an active part in using the site and contribute to it. Through the use of discussion forums, buy/sell areas, NZ news and information with a specific New Zealand flavour, it’s hoped to provide a website that Mac users in New Zealand will look to as their main source of all things Macintosh.

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With the exception of the discussion forum (which has always been a database-driven form system) NZMac.com began its life as HTML pages (see http://www.nzmac.com/previous_site_designs.html), managed using Dreamweaver. RSS feeds of news from overseas sites lessened the amount of work required to update the site at the time, but more was needed.

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I explored a number of CMS systems and had used Xoops for some time. The decision to move to Mambo (and then Joomla) was for a variety of reasons:

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Components

Bookmarks component (www.tegdesign.ch)

Community Builder (www.joomlapolis.com)

eXiT-Poll (www.phpprojects.net)

Google Maps (www.atlspecials.com/index.php?option=com_google_maps&Itemid=36)

JA Submit (www.joomlart.com)

JCal Pro (dev.anything-digital.com)

JCE Editor (http://www.cellardoor.za.net/jce/)

JomComment (www.azrul.com)

joomlaXplorer (http://developer.joomla.org/sf/projects/joomlaxplorer)

Knowledgebase (www.phil-taylor.com)

mosDirectory (www.phil-taylor.com)

OpenSEF (www.j-prosolution.com)

OpenWiki (www.j-prosolution.com)

Phil-A-Form (www.phil-taylor.com)

RSS XT (www.nodetraveller.com)

SMF Bridge (www.simplemachines.org)

YaNC (www.joomla-addons.org)

Mambots of Interest

TagBot (www.fijiwebdesign.com)

Modules of Interest

mod_kl_evalphp—used to pull in PHP code for OpenAds advertising (www.idealagent.com)

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My biggest issue has been anything that isn’t directly integrated into Joomla. The best example of this is the SMF forum, which is bridged...meaning that items of information (i.e., user information) are shared but not truly combined. This has caused users a few headaches with logging in and out, so I am planning to move to the forthcoming Fireboard (www.bestofjoomla.com) forum component, as it is truly integrated.

At the same time, Joomla still does not cater for true control over who accesses what or can submit items and so on, so access control and functionality has taken a long time to sort out and is still crude in many respects.

I also find the concept of archived stories very confusing. I archive nothing because this seems to suggest the item is no longer accessible.

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It has just made life so much easier, made control and organizing the site so much simpler, whilst allowing new functionality to be added in and tested much more quickly.

I may not be the tidiest of people, but I insist that my websites are tidy and exceptionally well structured. It has meant that developing content for Joomla has been so much quicker than traditional web creation.

This means I can respond to news stories, users’ requests, and site use in a much more immediate and dynamic way, and it has allowed the site to reach out to the web community far better, through the advanced functionality and through a web presence that is far more functional and professional than I was providing previously.

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Through something that Joomla and NZMac.com see as vital to their existence—Community! The vibrancy, support, enthusiasm, passion, and pure talent that is out there...and the fact that these people so willingly give their time to help others is overwhelming and should never be discounted as such an important factor in why Joomla is such a superb web system. It’s not just about the fantastic software...it’s about the community around it.

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Our organization, Smart Phone Resource, Inc., runs a family of niche website communities that provide information for specific smartphones including the Palm Treo, Motorola Q, and Apple iPhone.

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Our primary goal was to create websites that offer a wealth of information specific to a particular mobile device. In addition to offering news, our focus was to create an interactive site that allowed for our members to download software, submit reviews, and take part in our discussion forums. Most importantly, it was critical to have brand consistency throughout the end user experience.

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The site used static HTML, and each page needed to be hand-coded. The site was relatively small due to the time-consuming process of updating the architecture and pages. Our forums acted as a completely separate entity from our main site and lacked cohesiveness.

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In order for the site to experience growth, we needed a CMS. As the site had started to grow, it had become increasingly difficult to manage. One of the requirements in selecting a CMS was to find a system that allowed for rapid deployment of dynamic pages and content.

Our primary reason for selecting Joomla was the capability to integrate membership databases with our vBulletin forums. Although we had discussion forums, there had been an obvious disconnect between the main site and the forums. By integrating membership from our forums to our Joomla site, we were able to create a seamless end user experience.

Another key factor in the decision had been the SEO capabilities inherent in the Joomla architecture. There were also a number of available extensions and patches that allowed for the further optimization of the sites for search engines.

After researching other solutions, it was clear that Joomla offered the best in class when it came to content management, membership integration, and SEO capabilities.

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We currently have the following third-party extensions installed:

SEF Advance

SEF Patch Extended

DocMan

BBPixel jvbPlugin

JoomlaXplorer

jReviews

JomComment

MosKnowledgebase

Social Bookmarker Mambot

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At times, we struggle with the compatibility of third-party software. Joomla upgrades can become increasingly difficult when you rely on a host of third-party extensions that also require updating. We have found varying levels of support for the products utilized on the sites. We normally test a product on one site and will then roll it out to the other two once confirmed that it works properly on the test site.

The extendibility is what our organization likes most about Joomla. Our company is constantly looking at other sites and how they are using new technologies to offer a more user-friendly and interactive experience. If it’s being done on the Internet, you can count on a Joomla developer to offer similar functionality through an extension of some type. Our sites recently launched review sections that are on par with enterprise-level sites at a fraction of the cost. This will allow us to offer an expansive review section and a new level of interaction with our site visitors. Joomla empowers us as website developers, and more importantly it empowers our visitors.