Is anyone using Joomla for higher ed sites?

[Brian Smith]

I'm beginning to use it for other sites I design.

[Jonathan Pierce]

I'm beginning some experiments in the hopes of using it for our admission and residence life sites. My biggest concern is the lack of granular administration, that is, being able to lock users out of some sections of the cms while still giving them administrative control over their own. I don't know if there are any plug-ins out there that can extend the user management functions....

[Nicole Rhoads]

Joomla 1.5 is supposed to have greatly-improved user management features, so that should help. To work around this issue, we've set up separate Joomla installations. Frankly, I prefer the separation, so if there's a problem, it's limited to one site.

[Nicole Rhoads]

I've converted 5 of our sites to Joomla here at Albion: sports, news, tour, donor report, and alumni magazine. I first converted our sports site (to Mambo originally) in 2004 and I still love working with Joomla, and perhaps more importantly, so does our SID. I'm in the long-term planning stages of a full site conversion, and I've even found a vendor who may do the actual conversion for us.

See this thread on the Joomla forums about potentially consolidating resources for high ed users of Joomla: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,125196.0.html

[Tina]

Nicole,

Can you post some of your URLs for the sties you use Joomla. We are currently looking for a CMS system and we've brought up Joomla and ExpressionEngine.

[Matthew Gann]

Tennessee Tech is in planning stages of developing the university's web site in Joomla, including ALL departments (excluding athletics). Its going to be a big undertaking, but with the ACL's in 1.6 , its about the strongest free, open-source CMS out there. Just my two cents, of course.

[Gregory Eichholzer]

I am looking at Joomla as a possible solution for some projects that I have, do any of you know of tools that availble (if they exsist ) that can transfer SQL data from one table to say populate the SQL tables that Joomla would be using? In attempt to avoid copy-pasting thousands of pages manually...

[Jennifer Rumford]

I used Joomla 1 to create four departmental and two program sites in the last twelve months. I'm just starting to build the College site in 1.5. The College site was originally built in 1 by the designer who worked here before me. You can see the College site at geosciences.tamu.edu. The departments and programs are accessible from the menu or from the small thumbnail icons on each page.

[Nicole Rhoads]

Nice site, Jennifer. I'm also in the process of converting our entire site to Joomla (several application installs). We've had our sports site in Joomla since 2004 (originally in Mambo) and our SID really likes it. I've got a total of 5 sites running Joomla now, and I've used it for several freelance projects as well. Overall, there's very little I haven't been able to make it do, which of course makes the editors happy :). Good luck with your conversion and upgrades!

[Nicole Rhoads]

Nice site, Jennifer. I'm also in the process of converting our entire site to Joomla (several application installs). We've had our sports site in Joomla since 2004 (originally in Mambo) and our SID really likes it. I've got a total of 5 sites running Joomla now, and I've used it for several freelance projects as well. Overall, there's very little I haven't been able to make it do, which of course makes the editors happy :). Good luck with your conversion and upgrades!

[Michael McCready]

We use Joomla 1.0.13 on for our entire public site at http://www.lethbridgecollege.ab.ca and are looking at upgrading to Joomla 1.5. I hear that Joomla 1.6 is suppose to have even better user access management. One plugin I've used in the past is called JACL Plus. But there may be better addons for access control.

[Nicole Rhoads]

Hi, Michael ~

Your site is beautiful! I love it! Is there a plugin for the Kampyle feedback component you're using?

I've upgraded two of my five sites from Joomla 1.0.15 to 1.5 and it's been tricky. The template has to be completely redesigned, but 1.5 is sooo much easier to use (for users) than 1.x.

1.6 is supposed to have a built-in ACL, but since I'm upgrading the whole site now (and through this year) I needed something right away. I'm using Open Source ACL http://tinyurl.com/dce4sj and so far it's working really well.

Good luck with your upgrade! (BTW, they finally released a new migrator component earlier this month which should make things better than my first upgrade experience.)


Best,
Nicole

[Jennifer Rumford]

I just finished a major rebuild from our original Joomla 1 site, to Joomla 1.5. geosciences.tamu.edu

Thanks for the tip on the Open Source ACL - and I'm going to track down that migrator as I have a number of sites to migrate to the new template...

Jennifer