Joomla! is perhaps the most popular PHP based CMS on the web. An interview with its co-founder and core developer, Andrew Eddie, about the open source project that is Joomla is well worth reading.

Joomla is perhaps the most popular PHP based CMS on the web. An interview with its co-founder and core developer, Andrew Eddie, about the open source project that is Joomla is well worth reading.

With an estimated 10 to 50 million public websites running under Joomal and with 750,000 downloads per month it is an important open source project. Computerworld Australia caught up with co-founder and core developer, Andrew Eddie, about his own history as well as that of Joomla's, and where the content management system is headed in the future.

On the development process:

"Over the development of 1.6, we probably had between 50 and 100 individual contributors where the least contribution would be one line of code and the most would be massive volumes of code."

On future versions:

..for example, 1.7 might be completing social media tools, version 1.8 might be about improving flexible content. For each theme we might marry the ideas that connect with the themes. It won't prevent people from working on anything; the idea is you can work on anything you want, it's fair game to be considered, but if something is diametrically opposed to a particular theme, it might have to wait a version or two."

On the possibility of Joomla certification:

"What prohibits it at the moment is obviously cost. For open source to do it, you have to look at tens of thousands of dollars to actually write the certification, then you have to work out how to enact that."

And advice to aspiring developers: 

"My advice is always, go and see your accountant first and make sure you've set up the business side of things right and your minimising your tax.

Don't start with "I want to go into development and write code, and it'll all just work". It doesn't."

Read the rest of interview at: The history of Joomla!

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The Joomla MVC classes

Joomla Parameters

More Advanced Joomla Modules with PHP and Eclipse

A Simple Joomla Module with PHP and Eclipse

Building a Joomla component using Eclipse for PHP

Book reviews

Joomla! Bible

Foundation Joomla!

Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide

Beginning Joomla! Website Development