Hi Michael Babker tell us about your self

I am 24 years old and currently serve in the United States Army as an Information Technology Specialist.  On top of my job, I am a part-time college student, and I've been teaching myself programming.  Since I started using Joomla! In February 2010, I've been consistently trying to learn better programming techniques and help others.  For the better part of 2010 and right after the Joomla! 1.6 release, I was fairly active in the official Joomla! Forums trying to help others with basic issues, issues that I found interesting and wanted to better understand a way to fix, or questions about topics I had some familiarity with.  There's a lot of developers who came into Joomla! and are thoroughly familiar with the 1.5 framework; I think I'm unique in that I learned the 1.6 framework first.

You are a big contributor for the Joomla! Bug Squad - often, regular Joomla users is not aware of all work that is performed "behind the scene", can you tell us what you do?

Since the first 1.6 beta, I've been active with the Joomla! Bug Squad helping to troubleshoot and resolve bugs in the code.  I've been directly involved in the resolution of several hundred issues either through writing the code myself to solve the issue, testing a proposed fix, or discussing methods to resolve issues.  As Andrew Eddie credited in a tweet during the beta phase, one of the bigger issues I had a hand in working on was the issue of users being unable to edit content they created, which brought about the "Edit Own" permission.  Although the military has drawn me away from being able to contribute as much as I'd like, as well as me now having my own code to support (which wasn't the case when I first started with the Bug Squad), I still try to test patches for existing issues, contribute fixes for existing issues, and now that we have a Feature Tracker, hopefully I can contribute to the addition of new features.

What do you think we can expect to see from Joomla within a year?

Now that the Joomla! Framework is being branched off as a separate project, I think we'll begin to see some new innovation within the community.  I think we'll start to see replacements for some of the core components with alternative solutions, and perhaps full blown distributions of projects based on the Joomla! Framework.  This separation alone brings great opportunity that hasn't previously existed.  Also, I think it will be interesting to follow the development of Nooku Server and Molajo.  Both projects are bringing new innovation into the Joomla! community, which I believe is a good thing.

How can non-coders in the community support Joomla?

There are several ways that non-coders can support the community.  I wrote a blog last year about how I believe the entire Joomla! community is a part of the Joomla! Bug Squad.  If you are a user of Joomla!, you can report bugs.  Reporting bugs is just as important as fixing them, because without reports, the bugs cannot be fixed.  Aside from bug reporting, there is the forums where users can help answer questions.  We have the documentation portal which can occasionally be difficult to maintain, but can also be very helpful if the information is current.  Of course, there is the magazine, where anyone is welcome to contribute articles.  And lastly, I highly encourage users to leave feedback about extensions they use with the developers.  A quick review on the JED lets developers know what the user thinks of their extension.  If users find a component difficult to manage, developers should use this as constructive feedback to simplify their processes.  I've personally communicated with a reviewer of one of my extensions about the suggestions of his review and incorporated his ideas into my core code.

Whats your personal Joomla plans for this year?

Right now, I maintain two extensions: Tweet Display Back, a module that allows users to display user or list feeds on their 1.5 or 1.6 sites; and Podcast Manager, which is a suite of extensions for Joomla! 1.6+ to allow users to manage podcast feeds off their sites.  Neither of those projects will go away any time soon, although development may slow down depending on bugs or feature requests.  I've been testing frequently on the Joomla! Bug and Feature Trackers in preparation for the 1.7 release scheduled for around July 10, including filling a feature request for batch copy/move processing (a feature that was left out of 1.6 and brought a lot of questions as to why).  I've recently started working on a couple of small websites for friends of mine, so I've been expanding my familiarity with the various extensions available.  I'm going to continue to monitor Nooku and Molajo development, and as I've done with so many other projects, will test them, try to break them, and fix what I've broken.

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Tell us about you and your company

I am a PHP 5.3 Zend Certified Engineer and I have been writing code professionally for over 10 years. I now work almost exclusively for corporate clients in the UK, but I also develop code for systems like Joomla! in my spare time, and also take on additional freelance contracts when possible.

What is HTML 2 Articles?

HTML 2 Articles is a Joomla! component that I developed to take existing HTML pages and upload them directly to Joomla. During upload the HTML files are also very extensively processed to validate the HTML, transfer images, convert the encoding to UTF-8 and to optionally remove certain elements such as classes.

Why have you choose to develop for Joomla?

Joomla is used by several of my clients, and it was a natural progression from developing Joomla components for my clients, to developing components for the wider Joomla community. I find developing for Joomla is very rewarding; the community is fantastic

Do you have any thing in the "pipe"?

I am currently developing a new Joomla plugin called YouTube 2 Articles; when active this will automatically create a new article with the embedded YouTube video, description, keywords and title when a specific user uploads a new video on YouTube. I hope to have that released by the end of June!

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Tell us about RS Joomla - how are you?

We're doing great! A lot of stuff going on lately. In february a designer and a programmer joined in, and we are focusing now on new projects, such as Joomla! Templates and a revolutionary extension to manage these themes. There is a lot of work to do, but we're having a lot of fun doing it.

RS Joomla is providing lots of extensions for Joomla - is it hard to maintain them all?

The TODO list of our extensions is always full. However, having a lot of clients using them comes at a price. People always ask for new features and we try to satisfy them as quickly as possible. The good thing is that our products now have reached a level of maturity that cover the majority of the clients needs.

How did you feel about Joomla 1.6 from a developer perspective - was it hard to adjust the extensions for the 1.6 version?

We developed our extensions following the Joomla! MVC and it really helped us when making them 1.6 compatible. It took a month or so, but it wasn't that hard.

How come that you choose to develop for Joomla?

Back in 2007 I was creating websites using Mambo and Joomla! and I always had difficulties making them because of the lack of extensions of that time. So I started making the extensions that I needed and slowly started sharing them with the Joomla! community.

What will we see from RS Joomla during this year?

The next thing that you'll see is a nicer website and hopefully easier to navigate. We also started working on Joomla! Themes and hopefully in the next couple of months we'll release it.

The greatest thing will probably be the revolutionary extension that will let you manage these extensions which should really make it easier for users changing them.

We're also working on a new interface for our RSForm!Pro that I'm sure you will enjoy.

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Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos tell us about you and your company

I am a 30 years old Mechanical Engineer turned web developer. Most people know me as the Lead Developer of Akeeba Backup, the flagship product of my company, AkeebaBackup.com. You might be surprised, but I have no Computer Science background. I taught myself how to code and I was lucky enough to have the entire Free and Open Source Software community provide ample support towards this goal.

Akeeba backup is one of the most popular extensions at JED - why do you think it´s so popular?

Other people tell me it is so because it's the best backup component extension, regardless of the CMS. I don't think so. I believe that it's popular because it just works. People love software which installs, works and they don't have to worry about it. When it doesn't work there's top notch free documentation and the speediest free support around. I guess that providing high quality code, excellent documentation and lightning fast response is the best (and most difficult!) way to have a popular product! :)

You have develop several extensions and you offering both non-commercial/commercial versions - how is that working out from a developer perspective?

Offering extensions for free doesn't make much business sense, but I'm not doing into FOSS development to become rich and famous. I'm here because of the spirit of the GPL which is all about collaborating and helping others. I am a lousy teacher, so I can't contribute by teaching people how to use software. However, I am a decent developer, so my contribution to the FOSS community is my software.

From a making-a-living perspective, it turns out that the prospect of having a GPL-based business isn't as grim as you might think of. In the end of the day there are tons of professionals and companies who'd rather pay the developer to keep on coding, as well as provide them with one-to-one support. I tap onto that potential to make a living and finance my passion for helping other people. Making everyone happy by working together. That's what the spirit of the GPL is all about and, yes, it does work in the real world MUCH better than you'd ever think!

Recently you have released, in beta, Akeeba Subscriptions - can you tell us about it?

Akeeba Subscriptions was developed as the result of me "scratching my own itch". I had outgrown the capabilities of my previous subscriptions system and wanted something better. At the same time, I wanted something that "just works" and doesn't take a rocket scientist to setup and maintain. Unfortunately, all existing solutions were either way too simple and underpowered or way too complicated. So, I just sat down and began writing a subscriptions manager. Thank to using the Nooku Framework to do that, I was able to develop it in record time and add all those extra features I'd love to have: coupon codes, automatic tax rules, one page checkout, integrations with a ton of components and payment processors, beautiful-looking stats and compatibility with Joomla! 1.5/1.6 without much hassle. Its power is derived by its simplicity. It will never grow into a component that can handle all arbitrary business needs. If you need something like that, there's AEC; no need for me to reinvent the wheel. Akeeba Subscriptions will always stay a simple component that the majority of e-businesses can use to sell subscriptions on their sites easily, affordably and without spending an eternity configuring it!

Why did you choose to develop for Joomla?

Just a happy accident :) I was originally developing desktop applications using Delphi. At one point, I had to develop a website and I chose the now-defunct phpNuke. Soon enough we outgrew the system and went on the lookout for a new CMS. Mambo -Joomla!'s predecessor- fit the feature set we needed nicely and we started using it. Then we sifted to developing websites instead of custom desktop applications. When I left the company I was working for, I kept on developing web sites with Joomla!. Naturally, I started tweaking things and writing more and more code, so I evolved to a Joomla! developer.

What will we see from Akeeba developers during this year?

I get asked this question every so often, but the only frank reply I can give is "I have no idea". There are a lot of ideas for new features queued up. The only limiting factor of what will be developed this year is time ;)

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