As of January 2007, the Southern New England Chapter of PMI (SNEC-PMI) web site has an exciting new look, additional content and features, and hopefully provides our membership with easier navigation and increased value.  These were all the goals identified by the Web Enhancement commitee, lead by our Marketing Directors Linda Loftus, PMP and Kimberly Dornish, PMP.

To accomplish our goals, the chapter selected an exciting new Open Source "Content Management System" called Joomla!  This software jump started our efforts to build a 3rd generation of a member web site for our chapter.  We welcome any feedback or suggestions you might have about our new web site - please use the Contact Us section of the web site for that purpose.

If you'd like to learn more about the Joomla! CMS system, please read on...

If you've read anything at all about Content Management Systems (CMS), you'll probably know at least three things: CMS are the most exciting way to do business, CMS can be really, I mean really, complicated and lastly Portals are absolutely, outrageously, often unaffordably expensive.

Joomla! is set to change all that ... Joomla! is different from the normal models for portal software. For a start, it's not complicated. Joomla! has been developed for the masses. It's licensed under the GNU/GPL license, easy to install and administer and reliable. Joomla! doesn't even require the user or administrator of the system to know HTML to operate it once it's up and running. 

Joomla! features:

• Completely database driven site engines
• News, products or services sections fully editable and manageable
• Topics sections can be added to by contributing authors
• Fully customisable layouts including left, center and right menu boxes
• Browser upload of images to your own library for use anywhere in the site
• Dynamic Forum/Poll/Voting booth for on-the-spot results
• Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX server, Solaris and AIX

Extensive Administration:

• Change order of objects including news, FAQs, articles etc.
• Random Newsflash generator
• Remote author submission module for News, Articles, FAQs and Links
• Object hierarchy - as many sections, departments, divisions and pages as you want
• Image library - store all your PNGs, PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, GIFs and JPEGs online for easy use
• Automatic Path-Finder. Place a picture and let Joomla! fix the link
• News feed manager. Choose from over 360 news feeds from around the world
• Archive manager. Put your old articles into cold storage rather than throw them out
• Email-a-friend and Print-format for every story and article
• In-line Text editor similar to Word Pad
• User editable look and feel
• Polls/Surveys - Now put a different one on each page
• Custom Page Modules. Download custom page modules to spice up your site
• Template Manager. Download templates and implement them in seconds
• Layout preview. See how it looks before going live
• Banner manager. Make money out of your site

If you are interested in learning more about Joomla!, you can start at their main site here and there are many other web sites offering Joomla! support as well.