Dear Judy and Roger,
I work with Joomla/Mambo and Civicspace/Drupal and they are
both excellent cms platforms for nonprofits. Joomla and
Mambo are both very easy to install and you get lots of
functionality right out of the box.
You also get great functionality from Civicspace/Drupal and
Civicspace now comes with CiviCRM insatlled which is a great
benefit to those organizations that need that functionality.
I have been installing mostly Joomla for my recent sites and
find that most of the projects from the Mambo/Joomla
community have moved to Joomla. I would highly recommend it
for your hosting service because it is simpler to customize
and maintain. It has an excellent template facility and
there are lots of shops out there that can help support it
and do custom templates, etc. If you have DreamweaverMX or
NVU (open source) you can create the templates yourself and
the learning curve is not very steep.
If you are the hosting service then installing multiple
mysql databases shouldn't be a problem and is definately the
way to go. There are tons of tabels for each instance and
the potential for getting things messed up is infinitely
greater if you try to do this in a single database by simply
changing the prefix. That method is only appropriate for
folks that have been limited by there hosting service to a
single database. For instance, if you also want to install
CiviCRM on Mambo or Joomla you will have even more database
tabels and it is recommended that the CiviCRM database be
separate from your Joomla/Mambo database.
While I think Joomla is the way to go in general, there are
still some good components for Mambo that haven't moved to
Mambo yet and the "one size fits all" model is not
necessarily the best.
There are a couple of suggestions that I would make:
Definately support Joomla/Mambo as the easiest and best
solution for meeting the vast majority of your clients
needs. You won't be sorry. But, your clients may have
specific needs like availability of CiviCRM and it is only
fully functional in Civicspace/Drupal right now. CiviCRM is
also available for Joomla/Mambo but is only a back-end
(administrator) component right now and there is no
front-end available. The plan for that is a couple of
releases away. You can get more details on the development
at: www.openngo.org.
Civicspace/Mambo is also very good but has a steeper
learning curve and the administration interface is not as
friendly. The advantage of Joomla is that you can turn over
real ownership to a client with a simpler knowledge transfer
and they can much more readily learn to manage it
themselves. This to me is very important because I see
nonprofit clients getting in over their heads all the time
and being tied to consultants who may disappear and leave
them unable to manage their sites without help. This often
leads to abandoning all the work that's been put into a
project and changing the software because a new consultant
comes in and has their own ideas about what you should use.
Another question is what kind of infrastructure you have in
place for your hosting service. There is a really
interesting piece of software called "Blue Quartz"
- www.bluequartz.org. Many hosting services use the Sun
Cobalt RAQ servers because they are built for the purpose
with everything a hosting service needs to easily manage its
services. Sun released the source and it is now available
to run on other linux/unix platforms. There is a Centos
version that comes ready to install along with the os. It
takes only a few minutes to install and you are ready to
start working with it. It is very impressive. It handles
all of the virtual hosting, etc. through a very nice
GUI/CPanel type of front-end and allows you to easily
provision new sites for customers.
If you would like to discuss any of this further, feel free
to get in touch with me directly and I'd be happy to talk
about it some more. I LOVE Joomla and am a passionate
advocate. I am also very supportive of the efforts of the
CivicSpace community to develop tools that are designed for
nonprofits and advocacy groups and use it when it brings
functionality that is important to my clients.
Scott Samenfeld
Samenfeld Strategic Consulting
302 Summer St.
Arlington, MA 02474
781-643-8368
scott samenfeldconsulting.com
-----original message-----
>>The organization I work with (rtpnet.org) provides
low-cost Internet hosting services for North Carolina
nonprofit organizations, using Red Hat Linux, Apache,
Mailman, php, MySQL, etc. We host roughly 150 Web sites. A
few of our members have expressed interest in content
management systems. I've started looking around, but there
are soooooo many. (I'm not the system admin, but would like
to help with the research.) Is there a CMS we can put on our
server that our member organizations can transparently share
or should each organization have its own CMS? I've started
experimienting with Joomla. I've heard that Joomla may now
have better support than Mambo and that these are easier to
use than Drupal. Should I be looking at Drupal or a
customized Drupal distribution, like CivicSpace?>>
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