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I'm about to make a decision on choosing a CMS system for our webpage. Although we have had no pressure to move to 508 standards, my goal is to move our site towards meeting those standards.

Of course my biggest stumbling block to joomla is multisites - whereby I can give each department head access to their own department webpages. I've been researching and briefly looked at Drupal but it seems it is still mostly a hack to get what I want working there. (I could be wrong - just a quick stroll through their forum and docs page). I keep coming back to joomla - perhaps out of familiarity - I had installed it and got a test site based on our current site up and running. (Since taken down due to the safe_mode=on problem with our server- haven't played with any workarounds if any). But am considering separate installations of joomla for each directory which isn't the greatest (no site-wide search, any updates to templates have to be copied over department directories, etc.)

Joomla's 508 compliance is probably coming along at the rate that works for us since as I said, we are not yet under pressure. Our site ( http://www.nomealaska.org ) has a few things that would be easy to change to make more compliant (img alt tags, etc. and better navigation. No need to critique the site - we are possibly about to undergo a major redesign). But I am under pressure to give departments access to their pages.

A couple other solutions I'm looking at include this one:
http://www.govoffice.com/
Iit seems even many of the municipal sites that use them have 508 issues. But price is right. They must be part of this group:
http://www.avenet.net/ which has a few non-profit solutions for other types of business.

Another local (within the state) solution is http://www.amicro.biz/ which uses eWorx SiteManager. The details are very sketchy on the site and you more or less have to call them - but I've been asked to look at them as well. Their's does multisites (http://www.domain.com/siteA, http://www.domain.com/siteB, etc) as far as I've been told by their sales people. Last I knew, the Anchorage website www.muni.org uses them. (great domain, eh?)

Guess I don't have any questions, but looking forward to any discussions in this non-profit forum. Thoughts and thread hijacking welcome.  cheers, Jim

Jim,

Thank you for posting your comments.  We've done work with the US Fed Gov't, and have been hacking our way to 508 compliance.  I think that it's not a stretch to take Joomla 1.0 and make it reach the minimum 508 compliance with a little exercise.  As for looking at other solutions, I know that Drupal is getting hot with CivicSpace around, and that's a big reason why I wanted to see this forum built.  CivicSpace has done a great job working with the Drupal core team to make a system that is easy to use from a non-profit/gov't perspective.  I'd like to see us in the Joomla community do the same.

Looking forward to having you here.

Best,
Ryan

I think I know someone in Nome...  I might be remembering the name of the place wrong, but if I'm right, he was the director of the local Centre for Independent Living.

Re 508 compliance, you'll find that it doesn't take a lot to meet most requirements as is in 1.0, and that by 1.1, you'll have met all the requirements and then some (as we're aiming for WCAG 1.0 Priority 2 compliance).  I think that while the situation now is not perfect, starting development on joomla! now will get you going before long.

I'm not entirely sure if your departmental access will be resolved satisfactorily by 1.1 though, but it's something we'll be working on.  A bit of a question of not wanting to delay release forever and a day

Well, we don't have a Centre for Ind. Living here. There is a community center and assisted living center here.. current director being Bruce, but I can't remember who before him. An incredible amount of people have passed through this little outpost, considering its remoteness (no roads to here, 150 miles from Russia, west of Hawaii).

As for departmental access, I have to do something. I'm trying to steer us away from proprietary systems that generally have costs associated with them - save the tax payers some dough. I may do the separate installs, or further research Drupal or somesuch. I'm just afraid inertia will lock us into whatever we do so I want to make a decent decision. My web designer that I may start working left me an email saying she "had an idea" so I'm waiting to hear what that is.

cheers, Jim