Welcome guests, welcome members! Welcome to our tambayan in the Web!

Some things already in the works are a full-featured members-only area, complete with individual members' profiles, gallery, and forum--hopefully, the culmination of our longtime dream of having an online information directory that could be updated by the members themselves. And more. I hope to make the members area operational before the month ends, so keep your fingers crossed. Also, please avoid using the registration facility at the moment (whenever it's visible). That is, until I give the go signal in our egroup. It's just there so that I could test the features being added to the members area. From time to time you will also be seeing a message saying that the site is temporarily offline for maintenance. That only means that I'm temporarily keeping the site to myself. Either because I'm migrating a new feature online (I'm doing most of the development and testing in my home server), or I made some mistake and I need to rectify them quickly before anyone else notices (you know, the 'ooops!' factor). I'll try to keep the offline periods short and during non-busy hours (in the Philippines that is, so Brods in the US may be seeing them more frequently). Balik lang kayo.

Meanwhile you could spend your time reading some local news in our News Feeds section, or better yet submit some articles (our About Us page needs more filling up, among other things). I also need your feedback and ideas on how to further improve the site. Anything at all to make it better deserving of the title 'tambayan in the Web'.

For those interested, this site uses the open source Mambo CMS (Content Management System, not Chris Montes Scholarship). I'm developing the members area using Community Builder (CB) and Simpleboard forum. I'm actually thinking of migrating to Joomla! this early on, depending on whether or not it would better support our needs in the future. Drupal CMS was my first choice, but it just got too hard for me to make the template design work. So rather than change the design (what you're seeing now) I just changed the CMS :-). Besides, CB is a Mambo or Joomla! component, it doesn't work in Drupal.

Of course I would be remiss in my netizenship-civic duties if I don't add the customary 'this site is best viewed in 1024x768 resolution, AND USING FIREFOX'.