If you’ve read anything at all about Content Management Systems (CMS), you’ll probably know at least three things: CMS are a powerful way to do the web, 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 particularly complicated. Joomla! has been developed for regular folks in mind. They use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools that reminds me of Microsoft Word, and cool templates to chose from. Most importantly for me and Brockmann.com, it uses Cascading Style Sheets, a powerful W3Consortium technology that lets webmasters separate content from its presentation. That’s the power of the CSS technology – webmasters can modify the appearance of content without modifying the content.

Joomla! is also 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…. but I do (just in case).
My plan is to expand the features and beef up the presentation. I’m expecting the learning curve is pretty steep (already about a week’s work invested), but so far it seems to be working well.