Don't Spend any money on a content management system until you have looked at Joomla a "Cutting Edge" CMS!

OK my company has just spent 10's of thousands of dollars on a content management system by a company called Ektron. It is a world class system but it still has it's limitations.

My ISP host is one of the best ones out there in my opinion, a company called enom.com. I host 20+ sites for under $10 a month with database and .Net support and over 250 meg of storage for many years. Recently Enom.com added support for both community server and Joomla.

I've used Community server in the past and it never suited my needs, so I thought I would take a look at Joomla. Enom made it sooo easy to set up... create a DB, pick the domain you want to install Joomla to in your account and click on the Joomla add application link. The pointing of the database was a little tricky but within 15 minutes I had a full blown CMS set up and running. I wanted it for a site I am starting called CIPA.US about E-Rate and the childrens internet protection act. So I got the site up and was able to immediatly start adding links and information to it. By 9:00 pm the next day the site was already receiving over 15,000 unique user hits in the first day!!! What can I say I am good at promoting.

Anyways the next day I dug more into Joomla and it was one of those times when I started getting more excited and going Wow look at this... I can add this, Wow, cool, and ended up adding things and playing of course until 2:00 am in the morning before I realized it. It was just one of those times
when you find something that is so great you are mesmerized by it!

OK before you start asking how much, let me tell you how much.. 0 that is zero, zilch, nada...not 10s of thousands of dollars, nothing, under the GNU GPL, it is THE most powerful open source CMS that I have come across and has more modules and components wrtiten for it than any other. It has a simple web based admin form to install components and modules, you download the component or module as a zip and browse to it and click install and it will add the component to the control panel!

Once you get the thing going the first module you will want to load is Community Builder, once you get this one going you need little else! Get it from here

Then start browsing the extensions, mods, and components and you to will start to be amazed at what is out there! Joomla just turned 1 year old on September 1st, 2006 so they are now well established and several bug fixes and versions into being Stable. You'll need PHP and MySql on your server but check out Enom.com if you want a host that already has it for you and you can easily set it up. It runs on Linux or Windows.

2 snaps and 2 thumbs up to Joomla, a must check out if you run web sites. Peruse the Joomla website at http://www.joomla.org