I volunteered to serve on the web committee of the Southern Chapter of Medical Library Association (SC/MLA) this year. The work I do as the co-chair of this committee is to create a web site for the 60th Annual SC/MLA Conference. The idea of using Joomla for the conference site came from the folks at the Shimberg Health Sciences Library of Univ. of South Florida who use Joomla for their library site.
I have heard about Joomla before but never tried. I heard a lot about Drupal and WordPress at library conferences but not so much about Joomla.
Well, I spent a few days – three days to be exact – working with a Joomla site, and I am very much impressed. Joomla is easy to learn, and I love the fact that it comes with so many useful modules which can be configured and used pretty much out of the box. There are also many free template extensions that can be directly plugged in to create a nice web site. I picked a template and an extension for the banner image, installed and configured the settings, did some CSS editing to customize the overall style of the site, added a bunch of pages with lorem-ipsum content, activated a couple of useful modules such as breadcrumb and footer. That’s pretty much all I have done and Ta-da!
I am a web admin at work but we don’t use a CMS. Now if we ever migrate the site to a CMS, I will shout for Joomla. If you are looking for a content management system (CMS) that is free and easy-to-use, Joomla is definitely something to consider. Interested? Check out the Showcase of the library Websites built with Joomla.
(This is the site I have worked on, which is still in progress: http://library.hsc.usf.edu/scmla/)
