Winemaker Wears a Joomla! Developer Hat

“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.”

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