Sandbox

Hello.  I am brand new to Joomla, and I just installed the Joomla software to our webserver this past Thursday evening.  I have a few questions:

• Our current website (the non-Joomla one) is http://www.ascensionfdl.org/.  Based on the current way our navigational drop-down menu works, what would be others' recommendations on free Joomla menu systems to use?  We are open to completely new concepts/ideas.
• We would like to be able to have church members register through our website so that they can access content that would not be available to the general public.  For those of you have that have church websites with Joomla, do you ever run into problems where people are registering their user-name and password through your site but yet are not members...and therefore should probably not have access to certain content?
• Do any of you set up "dummy" users with the different roles...such as dummyAuthor, dummyEditor, dummyPublisher, etc.?  I was thinking this might be a good idea so that we could see exactly what an author, editor, etc. would see if we had people from our church assigned to these roles.

Thanks for any help/info you may be able to provide.

See if this is what your looking for:

Navigational drop-down menu:
There is an extension that creates a drop down menu… you can download the component here:
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/

You can see a demo on a site I’m currently working on at http://www.gateway.bz/RSMinistry

Church member registration:
There is a component for Joomla that has the ability to allow members to register but places their account in a “Pending” state until the user is approved by the administrator.

See this component:
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/

There is also a great support / documentation site for this component at http://www.joomlapolis.com

"dummy" users:
What I would do is have the people you want to play these roles register on the site then grant them the “author” or “manger” roles in the user’s area of the admin panel.

Hope this helps

These two extensions might be of interest to you:

Verse of the Day
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/

Prayer Request
http://mamboxchange.com/projects/prayer-requests/