New Products from a Joomla Lead Developer

JXtended.comIf you’ve been around the Joomla or Mambo projects during the last 5 years, you’ll have heard of Andrew Eddie. Currently he has the unwieldy title of “Development Working Group Coordinator”, but spend any time on the forum and you’ll see he’s hard at work in many areas of the Joomla project.

Last year we interviewed Andrew about extensions that he was developing. This week he launched his new site JXtended.com and with it over a dozen products.

Apart from making the owner of JExtended.com rich (I mistyped three times when writing this article alone) what can we expect from the new site?

Andrew’s New Products

The site has four major extensions:

  • Comments. Just what it says. Its an Ajax-based commenting system.
  • Magazine. The largest of the four extensions, its the newspaper-style component thats currently used on TheArtofJoomla.com.
  • Catalog. This has generated the most excitement among people I’ve talked with. Similar to the heavily-encoded Joomsuite, it allows people to break out of Joomla’s Section / Category hierarchy and create truly flexible sites.
  • Finder. An advanced search engine for Joomla sites. As we’ve mentioned before, Joomla’s default search features are weak.

Theres also an assortment of plugins, WYSIWYG editors and database tools. All of them need Joomla 1.5 and PHP 5.2.

New Approach to Commercial GPL

As mentioned in our interview, Andrew is using a commercial GPL business model. The way he’s going about it is unique in the Joomla world (to my knowledge).

People buy credits that cost between $8 and $10 depending on how many they buy. The Catalog cost 9 credits costs 9 credits ($90), Magazine costs 7 credits (around $70) and Comments costs 3 credits (around $30). Once you’ve purchased you can renew your access to support and documentation for a lower number of credits.

I personally think this has the potential to produce more stable products for customers and more stable income streams for developers. However, I may be wrong – there’s no way to know without testing. Andrew is brave enough to be one of the guinea pigs.

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