Joomla Byron a great success

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Internet Thinking made a decision some time ago that a major part of our business would be based around Joomla!, an open source content management system that delivers greater flexibility and power than our own CAMS system.

CAMS is great for advocacy groups, community groups and politicians, because it's easy to use and quick to install and delivers a high degree of sophistication at a good price. Joomla is more complicated to use, and each module has to be set-up, but it can deliver more complicated sites, like the one we built for Brisbane's Lord Mayor Campbell Newman.

But the best thing about Joomla is that as an open source package, it comes with a community.

Chris and I got to meet some of that community at Joomla! Day Byron Bay yesterday. The event was hosted by Bush Marketing, and Bush Marketing CEO Greg Cromwell did a sterling job keeping things moving between midday and 5:00 pm.

I was there a little late, but in time to get some tips from Jason Ferris on some of the extensions, modules, plug-ins and components available for Joomla. While I'm still a little vague on the difference between each of these terms, they all refer to pieces of software that have been designed to work seamlessly with Joomla.

One of the benefits of open source is that the source code is available for anyone to work with and produce their own modifications which they can then feed back into the project. As a result, with Joomla you are able to tap into the wisdom and enthusiasm of thousands of programmers who are working to improve and add to it.

I was also fascinated to see the capabilities of Freeway, an open source eCommerce system which can be plugged into Joomla, in a presentation by Damian Hickey.

For us as online publishers, Hans Lovejoy's show and tell of the changes coming to the Byron Echo's website was also interesting. You can always learn something from seeing how others tackle the same problems.

The audience consisted of everyone from developers and programmers like Chris, through Internet entrepreneurs like me, to business owners who know they need to be on the web, but aren't sure how to get there.

A Brisbane Joomla day is planned for later this year, and we'll post details to this site when they are available.

Graham Young
Executive Director
Internet Thinking

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