Quick questions Sigrid Suski

Hi Sigrid can you tell us about your self?
I live in a small German village near Frankfurt. I studied electrotechnics before I started to work as a software engineer for industrial products. Since 2009, I work together with my husband Radek full time for the Sobi projects. My programming experiences started with the programming languages Pascal and C, followed by C++ which is a good basis for developing software for Joomla!. Especially since the well known to me object oriented developing techniques find their way into PHP. I enjoy the outdoors in my leisure time, including spending time working in the garden. I also enjoy taking photos, but it seems I don't have as much time for photography lately.

What is the main differences between Sobi2 and SobiPro?
SobiPro is the follower of Sobi2, but built up from the bottom. While Sobi2 is a directory component which can be used to build one directory, it is possible now with SobiPro to create several independent directories on the same website. Also the new templating system of SobiPro allows to style every single view on the front end of SobiPro completely. This includes not only the category and details views, but also the search view, the navigation bars and each other view of SobiPro.

Fields are the heart of a flexible content system. While the different field types are hard-coded in Sobi2, SobiPro has the possibility to install new Fields easily in its Application Manager. An integrated Repository Manager simplifies the installation of applications and also makes it possible to update SobiPro with 1-click. Another new feature in SobiPro are the Access Control Lists (ACL) which allow to use different rules for the different user types. Each SobiPro directory may have its own set of rules.

How many people has been involved developing SobiPro?
SobiPro has been developed by my husband Radek and me. Radek is the lead developer while I additionally take care of all the business affairs around SobiPro.

Which kind of features will we see in the near future?
The future improvements of the SobiPro Core are targeted at the performance. For the 1.1 version of SobiPro we are going to make the administration interface more user friendly. Due to its modular concept, the most features for SobiPro are not longer integrated in the core but added by applications. This application feature list is long and contains additional modules, field
types and applications such as a Translation Application, Radius Distance Search and much more.
The development process of SobiPro applications is community-driven. We carry out polls in regular intervals. The winning app will be developed next. Therefore the chronological order is not fixed.

Joomla 2.5 is around the corner, any special features you want to see in the new LTS release?
The actual Joomla! core development already looks promising. As a developer I want to see a continuous improvement of its stability and compatibility between different versions. Already today, nearly everything can be realized with Joomla! using the various third party add-ons.