I had always dreamt of a job in web design and development as it was a hobby of mine in which I had taught myself some very basic HTML and CSS and was keen to progress (and still am) to PHP, MySQL and beyond.

So I received a call one day from a friend saying that she knew of a web design company who were looking for new team members. A week after going for an interview with the company director, I began working with the “Not Web Design” team in Salobreña on the southern coast of Spain. I quickly found out that every project they work on is powered by the Joomla! content management system and they had even developed software designed to help other developers use Joomla! I’d heard a few things previously about Joomla! and I couldn´t really understand why a team of professional developers would want to use something which I thought would be so restricting.

After half of my first day at work, I was completely converted. I find that Joomla! not only speeds up a lot of those usually very time consuming tasks, it also simplifies the way the development process works and most importantly, leaves all the power in the developers hands.

We have recently been working on an online dating web site for some clients and have (of course) been working with Joomla! The way we have been able to integrate all the Joomla! functions which we have chosen to use but create custom components and modules when needed has been great.

I am still very much a beginner in this business but the team I work with are unbelievably advanced. Joomla! does everything they need a CMS to do, without stepping on their toes.

I would recommend Joomla! to anybody wanting to learn to build websites!

We have just completed a new Joomla 1.6 component creator that we intend to release when Joomla 1.6 is made public. It will probably replace our current component creator. While developing it I have stumbled over a few bugs in the upcoming 1.6 and have reported them all. This one however is not really a bug, but it is still bugging me so I vent through our blog instead. As a Joomla 3rd party developer, I have been confused many times between the word “Preferences” and “Config”. You see the term interchanged throughout the Joomla documentation and framework. In 1.6 there is an new kid on the block that one would hope helps clear things up: “Options”. But sadly “Options” is just here to make everything even more confusing. Take a look at this example:

JToolBarHelper::preferences('com_component'); 

The above code use the phrase “preferences” to load a button that says “options“. The default values for the preferences (or options?) are set in a file called config.xml. This is just one of many many examples of this. It is all over the code, documentation and the forums.Maybe it is time for Joomla to make a choice and stick with it?

Update: We are very busy with a large web site with a hard deadline to the release of the 1.6 component creator is going to take a while.