2 minutes reading time (414 words)

Power to the People!

Power to the People!

Hard to believe it was only 10 years ago when Joomla was first introduced to the community. Back then, ( am I really saying " back then" for only 10 years? ) Joomla 1.0 was just introduced and I was enchanted by the power of the open source community and under the hood looking at code, scouring the forums, trying to make sense of it all. For me and my fledgling consulting business my customers loved my technical prowess with HTML but hated calling for every little change they wanted to make. It just didn't seem right they couldn't update their site by themselves and I agreed totally but had no answer for them until Joomla!.

This one idea - giving power to my clients - became the most important reason for continuing my business and has served well. Most of my clients don't want to become web developers or even administrators for their web sites. They are already experts in their own worlds of engineering, architecture, health care, spirituality, management, whatever their professions and attached web presence is about. But if Joan from customer service wants to make a spelling fix or correct the grammar on the "About Us" page or post new information about their new product or service, add a new image or PDF to an article, then it should be easy to do and not necessitate calling the web developer.

So in the spirit of a 10 year reflection, this has been where Joomla! has helped me the most: to define my job into a framework so I can provide my clients a structure they can work in and I can support it. This has been easy to do because of the way Joomla! is divided into “Managers”. My first sentence when turning over a new site is “Joomla is a set of ‘Managers’: the Article Manager, the Menu Manager, the Category Manager, the Component Manager…”. Clients can see there is a big picture there! True, there are other unmentionable CMS's out there that can do this also, but for businesses that expect to grow and for owners that can see their sites providing more than a snapshot of their services or a blog of endless subjects divided by month/year Joomla! does a really good job of giving some measure of control for those users that just want to keep their site content current.

So in the spirit of this special occasion Happy Birthday Joomla! and here’s to many more!

0
 

Comments

Already Registered? Login Here
No comments made yet. Be the first to submit a comment

By accepting you will be accessing a service provided by a third-party external to https://magazine.joomla.org/