I tried many solutions that did one thing and not another. Then I finally settled on one platform that seemed to be pretty open and it had great support via forums. That solution is Joomla.
Joomla is billed as the dynamic portal engine and content management system. It is in other words a multi-purpose CMS that can be molded to do your bidding. Taty recently covered 10 extensions for Joomla here.
Write down a list of what you want the Intranet to be able to do. What it needs to contain, not contain and how you want to achieve it.
Here is my "building an intranet for dummies" list:
- Have menu options for each department that will be accessing the site.
- It needs to be hosted offsite.
- Have a place to download documents, images and other information.
- Have a place for administrators to be able to upload those documents.
- Be password protected so only registered users can access our data.
- Be able to have administrators publish articles for users to see.
- Show directions to our site.
Joomla gets installed just like Wordpress. I use a host that has it and all I had to do was click on that and then locate Joomla.
After the installation is complete you will have the URL it was set up with. By adding /administrator to the end of the URL we can get to the administrator console like so:
Then you will click on Extensions – install/uninstall to get the templates installed. Then you will find them under Extensions – Template Manager as you see below:
Jevents allows you to set up events and a calendar to show when corporate events are taking place. Remositrory allows you to add file repositories that designated people will be allowed to upload and download.
You can go through the menu manager and edit the existing menus to display what you want. If you are decent in PHP you really can change anything in your Joomla installation. When I was finished with all my modifications this is what I had: (logo and other identifying information removed for confidentiality.)
Catch the changing security environment Get it now.
Good article. It tells step-by-step how Joomla can be used in building an Intranet. Thank you for this.
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