The United Methodist Temple of Russellville will be my primary focus for Saturday 11/11/06.

Currently, the UMT website can be found at: http://www.leecoursey.net/methodist

This website is operating on the Joomla! CMS backend. This is my first experience with this CMS product and it has been an entirely so-so venture. Thus far I have been able to figure most things out, but a few things still avoid me. Today will be primarily focused on creating a new template for Joomla for the church and updating and inputting actual content.

Currently installed plugins/features:

• Joomblog
• EventsCal
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor

Pros and Cons of using Joomla thus far:

Pros: it’s fairly easy to install and set up and it’s also fairly easy to input content once you figure out the lingo.

Cons: learning the lingo, the fact that Joomla seems to be designed primarily as a way to relate articles, clumsy controls about creating content (creating a page on the site and creating a new News article function and happen the exact same way)

Overall it’s a very cool product for the money – free. There also seems to be a very large user group and plenty of developers – many of whom seem to be looking to make a profit too. It’s not an entirely open-source community. Templates seem to be the primary money-maker.