The Dallas / Fort Worth User Group is a North Texas Joomla! mentoring user group committed to helping each other learn how to leverage Joomla! to make sophisticated web-sites for little investment.  Joomla!^® is one of the more popular open source content management systems and is available for free. Using this system can help you build and maintain your website more quickly and easily with more features than you may have thought possible.

Our meetings feature a workshop session addressing a few aspects of the system where we learn from each other how to build, improve, and maintain full-featured sites. For this reason, we try to meet in Dallas / Fort Worth locations that have WiFi so that members who own laptops can bring them for a more interactive session. Sometimes we focus on a particular aspect, extension, application or topic; while, at other times, we focus on specific issues or questions that our members bring to the meeting.

To RSVP for meetings and receive meeting reminders, sign up for the Meetup.com group.  ALL ARE WELCOME, whether you are an experienced developer or someone wanting to set up your first website. We're here to learn together and share.

• Do-It-Yourselfers
• Subscription Community Websites
• eCommerce
• Non-Profits
• Authors & eBook Sales
• eZine Publishers
• Doctors, Lawyers, Attorneys, Chiropractors, Real Estate Brokers
• And Many More

A content management system makes it possible for you or your administrative staff to update content as often as you like without learning HTML or complicated coding.  You can develop the site yourself or work with fellow Joomla! User Group member to do it for you. (Please check as members may charge fees for development work.)

•  Attend our meetings.  Lots of information is exchanged and we sometimes provide handouts with basic tutorials or other information.
• Browse this website.  We will be populating it with information and tutorials.
• Send us an email.
• Visit the Joomla! Website for more information about Joomla! and related news.
• For information about extensions and addons, visit http://extensions.joomla.org .

 

To get started, you will need to install Joomla on your own domain and host.  If you just want a temporary sandbox site to play around with Joomla! to see if it meets your needs, we can set one up on our host.  Eventually, however, you will want to get your own domain name and host.

Perhaps the better questions would be: Why both a Meetup site and this Joomla website? Why not just one or the other? Why make me register in two different places?

Meetup.com provides the group with several advantages. It comes with a pre-built audience which includes quite a number of local web developers and internet entrepreneurs. Individuals on meetup are notified whenever a new group starts that may be similar to their interests. Meetup groups also rank high in search engines. By being a part of Meetup.com, we increase our visibility. The event calendar on Meetup also allows for automatic notifications of members when meetings are created or changed as well as reminders about those meetings. So, being a part of Meetup.com also increases our meeting attendance.

So why bother with a website? Why not just use Meetup for the user group? Frankly, the idea of a Joomla! User Group without its own Joomla! website would seem odd, to say the least. Plus, the website gives our members a wider range of methods for participation and for information.