Part One: Starting with a plan

Joomla is one of the very best platforms for building meaningful communities and sharing content on the web today. With over 9500 extensions, 1000’s of world class template designs, the largest open source development community supporting it and a host of fantastic features built in, Joomla stands out as an easy to use and maintain tool for building online communities. However, building communities with Joomla is more than installing some of the great extensions like JomSocial and inviting a few friends to interact with you online. To build a community you need to have a clear strategy and there has to be a desire or need that you are filling for the people you want to attract.

• Whom is the audience that you want to attract?
• What is the main reason folks will be attracted to your community?
• What type of experience will they have when they get to your community?
• What will motivate them to return?
• What will be their benefit for contributing content?
• What will motivate them to tell others and help you grow your community?
• What features and information will offer the best value to the community?
• What will you offer now vs over time and in the future evolution of the community?

Once you start answering some of these questions you can then determine your priorities for building and configuring your Joomla CMS. You can also begin to define or refine a strategy for attracting and engaging your intended community.

Target a niche and build on it:

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Joomla! SEF Kickstart for implementing search engine friendly URL’s on your Joomla site.

Start by researching the features of the available Joomla CMS extensions and map their features with the particular needs of your site.

Here are several components you should consider:

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Joomla! CMS project Mistake Number Three: Having bigger ideas than your budget, resources and time will allow or than what is actually needed to provide the intended solution.

Often times we get a client with a relatively small budget and limited web experience that wants us to do all of the work and expects a fully functional Amazon type of ecommerce web portal system. Needless to say this is rather unrealistic. Robust features and capabilities are abundant with few limitations when building a portal system using Joomla! CMS. This platform is built on open source code and you can leverage over 7500+ 3^rd party extensions. However, where you do have limitations is in the skill level and resources available from the principle instigator as it relates to the scope or vision they want to implement.

 Avoid Scope Creep

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Mistake Number One: The Client thinking that they do not need to be involved in the process.

Joomla! CMS for simple sites with prepared content and well defined design specs on a site that does not change could be handed off to a team to “just build this” but sites with any type of dynamic and changing content requires a very hands on approach from the client to be effective.

Since the shift from static web sites through the introduction of the dynamic website revolution there has been a battle between where and when a client should be actively involved in the process of developing their site and where they can or should hand off aspects of the development. This is highly contrasted by the size of the budget and diversity of the stakeholders. The client almost always has superior subject matter expertise on their content while the Joomla! CMS support team has theirs in the framework, project execution and technology. We have found that every project is unique in these areas and there is not a one size fits all that works for any project.

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The Debate

One of the big debates lately regarding comparisons with Joomla! CMS, Drupal and WordPress is; Which works best for Government web sites? Well there is not really a definitive answer since each of these tools has their place and you should carefully consider the dynamics of the client and use of the system to determine this. However, since we have worked with all three systems and overwhelmingly prefer Joomla! as the solution we most often recommend to our customers, I wanted to share a list of Governments around the world that are committed to using the Joomla! CMS solution. http://docs.joomla.org/Government_Websites_Using_Joomla

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