"Red Newt Cellars has been online since 2000, but in 2003 Whiting decided to upgrade the site and hired a commercial software developer to create a custom Web presence. "It was very expensive, and we sunk a lot of money into the site. But [the vendor] was unable to support it.""
"Whiting knew there had to be a better solution. He was aware that there were open source alternatives to expensive proprietary applications. He already used OpenOffice.org because "we couldn't afford Microsoft Office. For me as a small business, if I have a dozen computers that get used periodically and I want to install Office on every one, that's a tremendous liability." When searching online for content management systems, he found Mambo. He liked the features and the fact that it was free of cost, and set out looking for a developer to help him customize and install it. "I wasn't successful in finding a person to do this kind of work in an affordable fashion," Whiting says, so he decided to do it himself. As he learned more about open source and content management, he switched to Joomla!, a derivative of the Mambo project, as the base for RedNewt.com."
