Interviews

In this section you can read Alledia blog posts containing interviews with people in the Joomla world.

Jentla

Interview with Damian Hickey Founder of Jentla

JentlaThis is an inteview with Damian Hickey, the founder of Jentla, which is a large-scale multi-site product for Joomla. The Jentla team are launching the product in the U.S. at this week’s CMS Expo in Chicago.

1. Could you explain Jentla in layman’s terms?

Jentla makes it really easy to develop and manage 1,000?s of Joomla websites. Many businesses have multiple websites but they can?t gain any advantages with Joomla until they are linked together under a centralized site manager. That?s what Jentla does. Adding, approving and publishing web content works just like offline where it flows through several responsible staff.? It?s possible to place the same piece of content on multiple sites saving huge amounts of time. Managing the administration of the sites is really easy too and operations like site upgrades and extension upgrades can all be done instantly across a very large group of sites. The Joomla CMS has a short learning curve but when you add Jentla to it, it becomes easier and significantly more robust. Jenlta is also the most ambitious extension to Joomla we?re aware of, providing the Joomla development community the opportunity to compete at the enterprise level.

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Template Design Class Interview With Rick Blalock

Rick BlalockFor the first time, we’re expanding the classes we offer at JoomlaTraining.com beyond just beginners classes. On April 22 in Miami, Rick Blalock is teaching a Joomla template design class. He’ll take you from a your basic HTML and CSS knowledge and using hand-on examples, he’ll show how to build a fully-fledged Joomla template. The class will also run on June 18th in Atlanta.

Rick is based in Miami and runs BeautyInDesign.com which was the first place on line to give people comprehensive tuition on how to build Joomla templates. He came to my attention several years ago with some groundbreaking templates including one that looked like a computer desktop and was the forerunner of many of today’s Mootools / drag-and-drop templates.

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Barrie North

New University Level Course in Joomla

Barrie North

Recently I found out that Barrie North from Joomlashack was running a university level course in Joomla. The class is “Web 2.0 Marketing with Joomla” and I asked Barrie more about this joomla foray into higher education:

1) How did the idea for a graduate level course come about?

I think Jen McKibben originally came up with the idea. I was speaking at the New England JUG about online communities and she thought a graduate course would be great (she is a program director at Marlboro Graduate Center). Its been a long time since I have been teaching in a classroom setting, so the idea appealed to me. I think that once you are a teacher, you’ll always have that desire to educate.

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Aaron Wall

Interview with Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com

Aaron WallToday we’re delighted a have the chance to talk with Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com. Aaron’s SEO Book has been around since 2003 and he writes probably the best one-person SEO blog in the industry.

As we did here at Alledia, Aaron recently shifted his business model from pay-to-download-my-book towards a more community-based training system. His new site is built with Drupal, so we asked him about SEO and Content Management Systems:

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sh404 SEF

Interview with Yannick Gaultier from sh404SEF

sh404SEFThose of you who read this blog regularly know how highly I think of sh404SEF.

Those of you who don’t … its a great SEO tool, one of the most actively developed Joomla components available, costs $0, and has great support from its developer.

I’m delighted then to have the chance to talk with Yannick Gaultier whos runs the sh404SEF project.

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GPL Week

Major GPL Series All Next Week

GPL WeekWe’re pleased to announce a series of interviews focusing on Joomla and the GPL.

Every day next week we’ll be talking with a Joomla developer who works with a commercial GPL business model. Five developers have taken the time to discuss their business and their experience building subscription and support-based projects.

Why are we interviewing people working with commercial GPL models? Because only a small number of people currently have experience with selling Joomla extensions under the GPL. Those developers have a wealth of useful experience that has yet to be tapped. Several have remained quiet during the GPL discussions.

Will you also interview five people with non-GPL models? No. Not because of any bias, but because I believe that the current development model is well understood. The commercial GPL model is still largely unclear to many:

  • Can it support a full-time developer?
  • Can it allow a company to grow and hire staff?
  • How long does it take to build a successful subscription-based site?

Will these interviews be pro-GPL propaganda? No. There will be food for both sides in the interviews. Not all of the developers agree with the core’s decision. However, its important that their voices are heard and hopefully their opinions will help people discuss the issue with more evidence at hand.

We look forward to seeing you back here next week.

Update: links to the interviews are below

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