Joomla is a CMS (Content Management System) that I’ve known about for over a year but never really explored. Until the weekend. I downloaded the latest version (1.5) and within an hour or so had installed all the neccesary components for an offline installation and got my first web site up and running. Cool. Configuring the design seems to be the part that’s not straight forward, but I’m sure I’ll get my head around it in time. I love the basic idea, although coming from a guy whose first introduction to web design was hand coding a html document, this is taking things a long way from home. But productivity is king, and this collection of technologies (Joomla, MySQL, Php etc) serves up one amazing little database driven website in a hurry. AND it’s open source!

It’s not for absolute amateurs, but for anyone with a grounding in web design, wanting to take the next step, this is likely to be it. Check it out!