I went to San Miguel de Allende for the first time about 5 years ago. It's a small town in Mexico that is popular with the American art "collectors" as well as many x-pats that end up retiring south of the boarder. The truth is, you won't find a beach in this Mexican destination, but in it's place are many great restaurants, galleries and thanks to its altitude, the weather is perfect for most of the year. Hence the attraction to the American retirees!

By now you're probably wondering why I'd be talking about Mexico on my tech blog... well, it's because I just had the opportunity to try out the open source content management system Joomla. I'm in the process of launching a website project for the town of San Miguel de Allende Mexico and instead of paying someone to code it for me, I thought I would try out the Joomla platform.

Nothing is perfect, but I have to say that I am very happy with the Joomla system. I had a simple site (without any design or branding) up and running in about four hours. And, it was much more that a static HTML page. It was really easy to add member login functionality, directory functionality, menus, and... I even found a module to load in the weather from San Miguel's 3-day forecast!