Quick questions Ronni K. G. Christiansen

Hi Ronni, Can you tell us about yourself?

My name is Ronni K. G. Christiansen i am 35 years old and live together with my girlfriend and 4 kids. On top of that I am the founder and CEO of redWEB ApS which contains the branches www.redcomponent.com www.redweb.dk www.redhost.dk and www.iredhost.com

I have worked in the web industry since 1993 where I started making web pages - from 1995 I have worked commercially with the web and in 1998 i stood behind one of the first CMS / Ecommerce systems that was a mainstream product here in Denmark.

I have been working with ecommerce solutions for more than 15 years and this is part of the background as to how redSHOP came to be. Since 2003 i started working with Mambo and then later moved to Joomla with everyone else and my only hobby I guess you could say is Joomla!.

I work, play with my kids and play with Joomla and thats about it - with a 100 hour working week there isn't much room for anything else :)

redWEB is maybe most famous for bringing redSHOP, what makes redshop stand out comparing to other Joomla e-commerce extensions?

redSHOP is not a webshop component but a webshop CCK toolkit that focuses on features that will help sell more products and understand what ecommerce is. If you venture into ecommerce, either as a merchant or as a webshop builder, you quickly experience that your shop needs to be unique and stand out.

To do so you either need to develop it from the base up yourself or have a strong tool for customizing your webshop so it can carry a unique story line. Today shops sell on discount or a story (even discount is a storyline) and the shop needs to fully underline the storytelling of the webshop in all aspects for it to maximize its potential.

Beyond that tools like the incredible SEO/SEF tools, integrated with SH404sef, and segmented newsletters (which can more than triple sales on newsletters) and action emails (that can increase sales by up to 10-20% a year) is really tools that are well thought of and fully implemented to improve the outcome of running a webshop.

Lets face it - a webshops role is to sell products - and for that you need the prober tools.

Recently, Joomla! Day Denmark was hold, how was it?

Joomla! Day Denmark was fantastic - this was the 3rd year we held the event and took part in organizing it and we had around 200 attendees in total over both days.

We had a very vibrant and upcoming community in Denmark and we can see how on the first year it was nearly redWEB Day now it really is becoming a Joomla! Day so our goal of building a community in Denmark by taking part and helping to organize the Joomla! Day and our JUGs (www.dkjug.dk which we built too) is really paying off in the long run.

At Joomla! Day Denmark we spent most of the sponsorship budget on bringing in International Guests from all over and having the help raise the bar of our event and really give it an international perspective too and around 35% of the sessions was in English so we also had attendees from Germany and Norway who came to Kolding to attend - sadly we didnt see anyone from Sweden but i hope to see some next year :)

In fact i have a dream that one day we can make a Joomla! Day Scandinavia perhaps and get all of the community from DK, NO, SE etc. along to the same event - that would be nice.

How "big" is Joomla in Denmark?

Joomlas position in Denmark resembles the global one in many aspects except here we do have Typo3 as a rather "large" player too in the sense that alot of the Typo3 houses seem to be swapping to Drupal. Historically they do have a lot of government client so there is to some extent a bit of favorism going on in favor of Drupal on solutions like that - however we put www.kolding.dk live half a year ago as the first responsive open source website in Denmark - built on Joomla - so i do see quite a lot of room in the market for Joomla.

What's in the pipe for redWeb, what can we expect to see in the near future?

In the next 6 months we are and have recently done the following:

Released new redCOMPONENT.com portal with single sales, better support, easier access, template club etc.

First redTEAM merge into the jPlatform by Florian (happend today) we plan to commit a lot more code we hope to see both in the Platform and in the CMS in the future.

Take part of voicing a need for better structures and openness in the project as a whole and try and focus on the lead of project managers, secretaries and leaders - specially within the PLT and all aspects surrounding the code and software of the project. Simply said we believe that better management can utilize the efforts of all of those brilliant developers out there wanting to contribute even better and by focusing the efforts, lot more can come out of it.

Release redCONTENT which is the CCK we built for the municipality of Kolding offering a string of unique features amongst others including version control, frontend content creation wizard, full ACL support and many more.

Release redSOCIALSTREAM with is a multitool for brining Social Media back to your website.

Release redBOOKING for J3.x - we dropped our old redBOOKING component with J1.5 and decided to write a completely new one for J3.0 utilizing the full power of Joomla! 3.0

Release a new redSHOP 1.2 series around 1st April that will be rewritten and contain 50% less source code due to optimizations.

And a whole lot more - but stay tuned on redCOMPONENT.com for all the news as we go along :)

Ps. to any Swedes attending the Joomla World Conference here from the 16th to the 18th in San Jose in USA i will be attending too and do drop by and say hi - yes i am the Vikingsized Dane ;)

Quick questions Matt Baylor

Matt Baylor recently became the Team Manager at JED.
Hi Matt, congratulation being Team Manager at JED! Can you tell us about yourself?

Well, my worst attribute is talking about myself ;-) I started using Joomla around 2007 while trying to build a website for a personal project. I went to school for web design and started a small design business, Natural Selection Web Design LLC (http://nswd.co). I cater mainly to small businesses and start-ups.

I joined the JED Team almost 2 years ago. I felt making a living using Joomla the least I could do was give a little back by volunteering.

How many people are in the JED team?

Right now we have 12 members. Over the past few weeks I have added some of the most talented and passionate individuals the community has to offer. Without their hard work and dedication we wouldn't be able to maintain the current site, let alone make the changes and improvements that I have planned. I'm always looking for new volunteers to help out with the workload. You can volunteer here.

When an extension is submitted at JED and the JED team takes over, what is the overall procedure?

When an extension is submitted it goes into a pending queue. As editors have time to contribute, they screen the submission using the submission checklists. If everything checks out OK, it gets published. If there are any problems the editor will flag the appropriate errors for the user to correct. The average wait time for the initial screening can range from as little as a few hours to 21 days, all depending on volunteer availability.

JED now holds over 10k extensions, what’s the biggest challenges maintaining a directory this big?

Right now we're at 10,085 extensions but when we drop support for Joomla 1.5 that number will significantly drop until developers update their extensions to 2.5 and/or 3.x. Right now our biggest challenge and project is migrating to Joomla 2.5. It's quite an undertaking, and thanks to tools like GitHub all of the team members can easily contribute.

Another problem area is submissions with errors. On average there's about 175 submissions sitting with errors. It's a bit disheartening having to invest valuable time into checking a submission 2, 3 even 4 times because the user didn't follow the checklists the first time around.

Will we see any changes or new features at JED in the near future?

Short answer: Lots. Once we get onto 2.5 I have quite a few improvements on my to-do list. We plan to evaluate the extension that manages listings and either re-write from the ground up or write a completely new custom extension. The Review System is going to get an overhaul that has been long needed. We're currently working on consolidating all of the JED specific documentation into the support system knowledge base. The Terms of Service is going to get re-written at some point. We have the Enhanced Listings project that will eventually get incorporated. Categories and usability are going to get some attention as well. Those are just the bigger areas that I see a need for improvement.

NetSukii - move your site to Joomla

We have previously interviewed Barnaby Dixon, you can find the article here. He has now released a new extension.
Hi Barnaby, you have recently released a new component called NetSukki - can you tell us about it?

NetSukii is an import component that works as a spider. It first crawls your site, to find all the possible pages for import. Then you can import each page to Joomla according to your import settings. The new article is integrated in Joomla, and behaves exactly like any other article. The new article will be available in the article manager, and will contain the original page's content.

How does is it handle more complex things like categories, meta tags, users and forum posts?

For the category, you can import ALL new articles to an existing category. Alternatively, you can use the 'Automatic categories' function to try to determine what category the new article should use. So if you have a page at yoursite.com/Finance/Banking/interest.html your new article will be called interest.html, and will try to find the Finance category, and subcategory Banking. If the categories don't exist, they will be created. This way, with a good SEO component such as SH404sef, you can maintain your original link structure.

Metatags are automatically retrieved and saved to your new article, if you decide you want to keep the old metatags.

You can set the user to use as the 'author' in the import settings. You can also set the author for each individual URL before import.

Forum posts will currently be imported as individual articles. I currently recommend to not import forum posts, and instead to re-create the forum in your Joomla environment, and then to copy your old forum database to your new Joomla system.

Previously you have released HTML 2 Articles, will NetSukki replace H2A?
NetSukii will not replace HTML 2 Articles, but is a similar tool, and will work alongside it. Many people are still using old HTML and Frontpage based websites, and HTML 2 Articles is still the easiest option for importing those. But if you have a dynamic PHP or CMS based site, or a large live site, NetSukii is going to be the tool of choice :-)

Quick questions Daniel Dimitrov

Hi Daniel, tell us about your self

Hey Kristian thank you for the quick question interview. To be honest – I think that this this is the first time I’m being interviewed! I normally try to stay away from the projectors light, but I’ll make an exception for you :) I’m the founder and lead developer at compojoom.com . I started this adventure 5 years ago and it is getting more and more exciting every day. When I’m not fixing bugs, doing support or just fiddling around I like to do sports and travel.

Daniel Dimitrov compojoom

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Komento - a new extension from Stackideas

Hi Andrew, Stackideas recently released a new extension named Komento. Can you tell us about it?
Komento is a brand new comment extension that manages all aspects of comments for articles in Joomla, blogs and even product pages. It is more like a plugin that allows users to express themselves and share their feedback in social medias like Facebook, Twitter and more. We are proud to announce that Komento also integrates with the latest EasyBlog 3.5.