As you may have noticed, there have been huge (and ongoing!) changes to the Cole Harbour C@P Site web site. We have chosen to move to Joomla!, a free and open source content management system (CMS). This move was done for a number of reasons:
- Content availability
We want to be able to provide up-to-date, relevant information to our users. By moving to Jooma!, we are able to organize our information easier, publish new information more quickly, and present the information in a more user friendly manner. We hope this will mean a more rich user experience in the future. - Future updates
The Joomla! system provides the C@P Site staff and volunteers with an easy way to update new information. With a static, non-CMS page, we were forced to make updates directly in the HTML (coding) of the web page. This severely limited the amount of people who were able to edit and update the page to those who knew how to edit the code. By moving to Joomla!, any of our volunteers and staff can edit the data providing users with more information.
On another, more technological level, we are moving to a system which is bigger than ourselves. Joomla! is open-source, widely used, with a huge amount of plugins and other third-party components available. This relieves a large portion of the burden placed on the web page maintainers, by using a system which is developed by others than us. On a system-level, this allows us to have an up-to-date system, without having to continuously edit the code. Although the end-user may not notice a huge change in this respect, they will notice that the resources can be placed on where it is most important - the content! - Users
With Joomla!, we can now offer specific benefits to those who enroll in our classes and one-on-one lessons. Because these are paid services, it makes sense for these users to be able to continue to have access to the course materials at home. By the same token, these documents are intended to be for those who pay. By utilizing the built-in user functionality of Joomla!, we can have these features available, while continuing to offer information on the C@P site for those who have not yet enrolled in a class.
I hope this provides some insight into our recent changes. As the C@P Site is a community based organization, when changes affect our users (whether good or bad), the users should know "why". If there are any questions about this move, use the information on the Contact page, under "About". Thanks for reading!
