The www.electricsoftware.co.nz web site is currently (June 2008) built using DotNetNuke.

I really like DotNetNuke, it runs well, is easy to understand and there is a great market of available extensions but I am considering moving the site to Joomla.

Why am I doing this?

Not because I necessarily think Joomla is better.... I guess I will find out on this point.... but mainly because I am trying to consolidate hosting of www.electricsoftware.co.nz with my other sites (www.railtrack.co.nz, www.quicktrip.co.nz and www.avmet.co.nz) which are all hosted at Site5 - a hosting provider based on Linux.

My first hurdle was getting Joomla going.... if you take the "standard" install that Site5 will do through Backstage you get Joomla version 1.0.14 or similar. This was really easy to get going but I couldn't quite work out why it looked different from the Joomla one of the guys at work demonstrated. This is because the Joomla you really want is version 1.5.

To install this at Site5 you need to manually install the files.... bit it caused a bit of head scratching to work out why I couldn't get the web install to go... the answer..... .htaccess.

If you do a manual install into Site5 (and likely other places) you must:

1. Rename the htaccess file provided as part of the distribution as .htaccess (quite understandable that the install doesn't overwrite what you have but a bit puzzling for those not really used to configuring linux based web servers).

2. Also I suggest using PHP5 which many require the following line in .htaccess:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

Once these are done it works great.

Hope this helps someone.