About Joomla! User Group - Dallas / Fort Worth

Who We Are
North Texas Joomla! mentoring user group helping each other learn how to leverage a content management system to make sophisticated web-sites for little investment.

Joomla! is one of the more popular open source (free GPL license) content management systems available. Using this system can help you build and maintain your website more quickly and easily with more features than you may have thought possible.

Our meetings for Joomla! User Group - Dallas / Fort Worth feature a workshop session addressing a few aspects of the system where we learn from each other how to build, improve, and maintain full-featured sites. For this reason, we try to meet in a location that has WiFi so that members who own laptops can bring them for a more interactive session. Sometimes we focus on a particular aspect, extension, application or topic.

ALL ARE WELCOME, whether you are an experienced developer or someone wanting to set up your first website. We're here to learn together and share.

Group Rules

What is Joomla!

Joomla! is a popular, free Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP and utilizing MySQL. It is free because it is an open-source project where individuals and teams contribute their skills to its development as well as its supporting systems. Joomla! can be used for everything from simple individual sites to larger corporate sites.

Joomla! endeavors to separate out more technical tasks from the non-technical tasks making it easier for a non-technical person to install, update and maintain the website. In addition, (as with some other content management systems), multiple people can be given permissions to provide content or support the site in other ways.

Extensions

Joomla! is a powerful core framework that speeds developing a website and creating functionality, but the real secret to Joomla's power lies in the wealth of extensions available to add capabilities and functions to your website. Many of these extensions use a GPL license like Joomla! (free), but some are commercial (require payment).

There are currently over 2200 extensions listed at http://extensions.joo.... They include such functionality as dynamic form builders, business or organizational directories, document management, image and multimedia galleries, e-commerce and shopping cart engines, forums and chat software, calendars, blogging software, directory services, email newsletters, subscription services, community sites, and many, many more.

When we get together, we frequently take a look at some of these extensions and what they can do. If you're a PHP developer, you may want to look at creating your own extensions as well.

Templates

Templates determine the overall look and feel of your Joomla! site. You can create your own, use an existing template as is, or modify an existing template. Joomla! comes with a few templates pre-installed but you can find other templates on the web to use. Many templates are free, but some commercial templates do come with a price tag either individually or through a template club membership.

Even if you're planning on creating your own templates, browsing through template sites can give you ideas for your business or web design.

In our meetings, we sometimes also talk about template sites, installation, and modification.

Examples:

Do you have examples of Joomla! projects you've completed or have in progress? Please feel free to share them here and/or in our meetings.

Website!

We've just launched our new user group website JoomlaDallas. It is currently running Joomla! 1.5. Take a look for more information about Joomla, our user group, and our members.