An Interview With K2 Creators, JoomlaWorks

Joomla is one of the best CMS around. Along with Wordpress and Drupal, it is the choice of thousands of developers and companies when it comes to solid content management and publishing. What makes Joomla stay on top of the competition is it’s seriously state of the art API that allows developers to create their own custom extensions and plugins that add features and functionality to the system.

We had the opportunity to interview the owner of JoomlaWorks, Fotis Evangelou. The company behind K2. It was a pleasant talk and an opportunity for us to look deeper into the magic world of Joomla. Even though time is money, Fotis kindly answered all my questions about JoomlaWorks, K2 and Joomla in general.

Here we go.

Jeez Tech: Hello Fotis, I am happy to talk to you.

JoomlaWorks: Hello Vasilis. It is a pleasure for me too.

Jeez Tech: The pleasure is mine for talking with the creators of such a great extension as K2. Tell me some words about JoomlaWorks.

JoomlaWorks: JoomlaWorks is a company specialized in Joomla development. We started developing for Joomla in 2006 and since then we are committed to bring some of the best extensions and give them back to the community.

It was 3 years ago that I started creating websites with Joomla and as JoomlaWorks grow bigger, more people were added. In the meanwhile, we noticed that Joomla lacked some crucial features that other systems like Drupal and Wordpress not only had but they were builtin also. So, it was a natural conclusion that we would go into extensions development.

During the last three years, JoomlaWorks managed to become one of the most popular and respected Joomla development companies. We have released 16 GPL licenced extensions and 3 commercial ones. Our extensions and plugins were downloaded more than 2 million times and our sites serve more than 400.000 unique visitors per month.

Jeez Tech: Before we go into K2, are there any other extensions that you are really proud of having created?

JoomlaWorks: Even though other extensions are simpler than K2, most of them were one step forward from the competition. This is why we have the biggest number of extensions showcased in the Joomla “Most Popular” extensions directory. As a matter of fact, we are the only company that holds two places in the most popular extension’s Top 10. This really makes us proud! Our favorite extensions though are the ones showcased in our main page in general.

Jeez Tech: What about K2? Was it something that came up or a planned extension?

JoomlaWorks: As I mentioned before, there was a big gap in Joomla publishing features. Features that were defacto on other popular CMS like Drupal and Wordpress. As professionals, we needed these crucial features in Joomla. So, since there was no such extension that would really do the job, we used our experience and created K2. We managed to take the best from Wordpress and Drupal and added them into one Joomla extension. It was our needs that created it.

Jeez Tech: How would you describe K2’s development status? Do you plan on adding more features in the future?

JoomlaWorks: K2 is a stable version that we improve it’s features functionality. No need to add more features since it offers a great API that developers can use to create Joomla K2 plugins and extend it’s forms. As with Joomla, K2 follows the same principles. We want K2 to be powerful with it’s features and as extendable as possible so that developers can use K2’s power to create plugins.

Jeez Tech: Speaking about K2 plugins. How many plugins are out there and which ones are your favorites?

JoomlaWorks: At the time spoken, there are 30 to 35 plugins plus our custom made plugins that we plan to give back to the community. I really like Nikos Dionysopoulos’s plugin that extends Joomla’s most popular editor to use K2’s content. RocketTheme’s modules like RokNewsFlash, RokNewsPager and RokTabs, and Robert Deutz’s comment system that replaces K2’s comment system with a more accessible one, are also my favorites.

Jeez Tech: Your plans for K2 include porting the extension to other popular CMS?

JoomlaWorks: This is way too much. Porting K2 to other systems would require a lot of work from us and this is something that would mislead us from our main goal. That is to create quality and useful extensions for Joomla. Not to mention that it would not worth it. If you start with Joomla then you will realize why we chosen to work with it.

We have developed some addons for other systems that we use internally just to get the grip but when compared to Joomla’s flexibility and performance, there’s no luck. So our moto is “Joomla all the way”. This is not a funboy’s opinion about Joomla, just to set things clear.

Jeez Tech: Many people say that K2 is a CMS inside Joomla. Should we expect a CMS out of Joomla too?

JoomlaWorks: There is no reason for another CMS. Joomla’s framework is one of the best in the market and if you get used to it then you can really do magic.

Jeez Tech: What would you say to someone that wants to start with Joomla developing? Does it worth to enter a market and compete with companies like JoomlaWorks ?

JoomlaWorks: As with all things. If you love what you are doing, it is most likely that you will manage to achieve your goals. Joomla is a great starter for success. Just to mention that with Joomla and K2 you can create websites that have nothing to fear against commercial CMSs when it comes into features, add greater flexibility and power on many points and this sums up a great motivation to start with Joomla, create websites and make money.

If the next move is Joomla extensions, then he / she should know what his / her needs are and, to create extensions that cover the market needs or do something better than existing solutions. So, my main advice would be : “Be unique, think ahead”.

Jeez Tech: One last question Fotis. Who and how many, is JoomlaWorks?

JoomlaWorks: We are 7 developers now. We plan to create a new site for JoomlaWorks next month and all developers will have their own personal pages there. We will be rebranding soon.

Jeez Tech: Wow! This was really fun for me. I hope we talk again in the near future.

JoomlaWorks: The pleasure was mine. Thank you and keep up the good work :)

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