Nashvilleriders.com is powered by Joomla!, and open source content management system that started out as a fork of Mambo. I prefer using Joomla! as it works well for non-programmers such as myself. It offers strong support from the Joomla! community and has powerful, if sometimes a bit complex, backend administration system. There are tons of templates, components, and plug-in's out there for it which many of are free (we like free) and offer just about any type of functionality you can think of.

The template we're using (and have modified a bit) is from Siteground, which offers pay for and free templates for customizing the look of your Joomla! site. They also offer hosting and other Joomla! related stuff.

We use Kunena for our forums here on the site. We have been using Agor for nearly a year but since it went to a commerical product (which means "pay for") I have turned to the new 1.6 version of Kunena.

JEvents created the component we use for our events calendar and it has made my life much easier. It's ability to allow users to add events from the front end as well as a powerful backend administration panel made choosing it a slam dunk.

The Nashvilleriders.com logos (we've got a couple of them) were created by Nicole Koestel, a local graphics artist here in Nashville. Nicole did an excellent job taking the horrible sketches I made and turned them into clean and good looking branding graphics. Thanks again Nicole!

Our header image at the top of the page was shot by yours truly. It's actually a composite of three photos. The road is from one of my shots of the Natchez Trace Parkway I took for my article on the Parkway. The bike is my SV650s which I photographed in the garage, and the image in the rear view mirrors is a different photo from my Natchez trace images. The images were composited using Photoshop CS4.

If I missed something here about the site that you want to know more about, shoot me an email and I'll do my best to answer it.

The official Joomla! website

Siteground

JVitals! website

JEvents

Nicole's LinkedIn page

Jacksonphotoworks.com (my site)

My current ride is a 2006 Suzuki SV650s and I ride a good bit. Over the three years I've had her, I've put just over 26,000 miles on her. I tend to like standard bikes with my previous two rides being a 01' Kawasaki ZR-7s and a 1981 Suzuki GS550e.

I enjoy a good twisty road but I'd probably be considered by some to be a bit of slow-poke, though others say I go a bit too fast. Perhaps I'm in the middle? This is fine with me as I follow the philosophy of "Ride Your Own Ride".

In 2010 I intend to start exploring the dirtier side of riding with Crazy Uncle Johnny as he's been after my a$$ to do some dirt riding with him. I've got little to no gear for off road riding and don't even have a dirt worthy ride yet, but perhaps its time.

That's about all I've got for now and I'm just not that interesting so go read some of the content here on the site. It's got to be more exciting than this.

-ed