Joomla!: My First CMS Experience

Last week, our kukui tech prototype group's task was to narrow down our selection of CMS for

the project. After our first group meeting with Professor Johnson, we now have a better idea on what to look forward to with the project. Our initial comparisons consisted of 10 different CMS. We read up on Anahita, dotCMS, Drupal, Elgg, Joomla!, MODx, Ning, Pligg, Silverstripe, and Wordpress. We found a lot of good information about these CMS. We setup our review by categories which were based on what we already knew about dorm energy competition. The categories that we gave importance were ease of use, social networking, and

extensibility. We then decided as a group to select dotCMS, Drupal, Joomla!, and Silverstripe to do actual testing. My task for the coming weeks is to get familiar with Joomla and try to create mock up pages for PublicHomePage and StudentHomePage.

So far I have set up my machine (Macbook Pro) to be able to host and manage websites locally with the help of MAMP. MAMP allows me to set up my machine to act as a personal web server. After setting up the web server, I went ahead and downloaded a copy of Joomla. Setting everything up from MAMP to Joomla was pretty easy. So far, all I have are the default pages that Joomla provides. I'm still getting used to how everything works by playing around with the backend administrator settings. There are lots of things to be learned and hopefully by next week I will have a full page mockup.

-David Joel Lazaro