The Alliance for Catholic Education, or ACE, was featured recently in the Joomla! Community Showcase for its creative use of some core Joomla features as well as the integration of third party resources. Ricky Austin, the organization’s Assistant Director, is listed as the creator of this multi-faceted solution that uses Joomla 1.7 to manage a network of 12 separate but very connected sites, all of which share one instance of Joomla and one database. With this method, they are able to maintain consistency visually throughout the network of independent websites, as well as share all of the features built into the single Joomla instance.

ACE is reportedly using the Gantry framework to help unify the websites by taking advantage of the multiple template feature built into Gantry. This makes it possible to share the extensions across all sites in the network, allowing all members of their organization access to the same newsfeed, online membership, a social network, blogs and more. They have listed Yootheme's Zoo, Sh404sef, JCE, JSPT and Socialable's Autogroup as included extensions.

ACE also mentions that they have plans to integrate CiviCRM into their overall solution in the near future.