Advice Please about Joomla?

acoc100

Hi,

I recently volunteered to do a website for the non-profit sector.
I have fairly modest web design experience.

I was wondering if Joomla would be a good fit for what I have to do.

The website is for a regional voluntary sector website.
The Site must contain a Notice Board, a news section and a Forum.

The website will need to be updated regularly by volunteers
thats why I was thinking of a CMS like Joomla so I wouldn't have to be updated the site myself.

I have never completed a website with Joomla before but I recently installed it on my PC and was messing with adding stuff and changing templates used on it.

Do you think a Joomla template would be suitable for this project?
Would it take to download a template and customize it, Joomla website for a bit of a novice?

Also is it a hard process to get from having a completed website on a local host to getting it live on the internet?

Cheers,
Andy

dory

Well I know the answer to the last one anyway, no it's not a hard process. I managed it by watching video tutorials my hosting people made available.

I'm not too familiar with Joomla, but have a look at Wordpress. I feel like I should be on commission at this stage, I've told so many people about the wonders of Wordpress. I have made a few sites on that with minimum knowledge. The best thing is that so many people are creating tutorials for Wordpress so there's an abundance of it around.
Go to the WP website, look around, you can do everything you need to do on that. You'll need to know HTML and CSS to do big modifications, but you'll have to know that really anyway.
I'm in the middle of creating a site for a non-profit, PM me if you want I'll tell you all that I know. I was a complete novice a few weeks ago but I've been educating myself. There's a magazine in Easons called Web Designer, this month's issue taught me all about WP and my sites are all the better for it.

Buttercake

acoc100 wrote: »

Hi,

I recently volunteered to do a website for the non-profit sector.
I have fairly modest web design experience.

I was wondering if Joomla would be a good fit for what I have to do.

The website is for a regional voluntary sector website.
The Site must contain a Notice Board, a news section and a Forum.

The website will need to be updated regularly by volunteers
thats why I was thinking of a CMS like Joomla so I wouldn't have to be updated the site myself.

I have never completed a website with Joomla before but I recently installed it on my PC and was messing with adding stuff and changing templates used on it.

Do you think a Joomla template would be suitable for this project?
Would it take to download a template and customize it, Joomla website for a bit of a novice?

Also is it a hard process to get from having a completed website on a local host to getting it live on the internet?

Cheers,
Andy

Yeah Joomla is great, i love using it, so many components out there for any type or requirement, join the official joomla forum and starting messing with it

yeah you just upload the site when you are ready and change the settings.php file to the sql database on your hosting account and import the sql dump

Djdukey

Hey,
I bought Joomla for Dummies book in Easons in O Connell st. Its on the bottom floor down by the computers. Really straightforward book and explains easily how to upload it and manage it. Even how to customise it. There were 5 books there and 3 were €40 odd and 2 were €14.99 ?. I picked one up for €14.99. Its the newest version of the book and the exact same as the other 3. Worth getting for that price

janifor

Hi Andy,
I would Recommend you to develop the site on the online server not on localhost but you could use localhost for your testing purposes there are a lot of free tutorials on the Joomla Newbies and you would have to learn from the joomla forum discussion to advance in your developmet

Look for the Joomla Extensions for your Notice Board, News section and Forum that are avialable free as well

I wish you luck in this matter Happy Developing.