Talks & Sessions

Exciting possibilities for government when using Joomla! CMS for their websites

This presentation will cover the advantages for government for using Joomla! It will also cover the challenges that are faced by Joomla! developers when dealing with government. An overview of the government’s take on open source standards, free / open CMS and direction in dealing with website development will be undertaken. A case study (of how not to develop a CMS-based website will be presented). Another quick case study will be presented – Dihlabeng local municipality (www.dihlabeng.gov.za) website – to demonstrate a better approach to ensuring government’s buy-in into Joomla!

A few key issues relating to how government should approach open source standards will be discussed. Government’s own hiccups in adopting and employing Joomla! will be highlighted as well – these will include a politically-enabling environment, corruption, lack of knowledge and being out of step with current web trends.

A kit of important tools that could be typically used by government will be developed. I will also present a Joomla! package aimed at governments – with very typical ingredients for a government website. The toolkit will be a pre-packaged Joomla installation that governments can use and configure with ease. This toolkit will include an administration component, a typical template, with other components that can be typical to Joomla. All of these will take into consideration licensing issues of each separate template / component etc.

Codenamed Mmuso, a conceptual Joomla-built website / template that is aimed at government sites will be unveiled.

Presenter: Phehello Mofokeng (ZA)