Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications. I have been working with Joomla! for close to four years now. Along with many others from the Joomla! community, I have developed a number of add-ons - or extensions for those well-versed in Joomla! vocabulary - including:
- Expose Flash Gallery
- Expose Image Scroller
- Random Simpson Quotes for Joomla!
- Wimpy MP3 Player for Joomla!
For the last 6 months, Expose Flash Gallery has been known as the number one gallery add-on for Joomla!. We just passed the 300,000 download mark and still counting.
Expose started as a semi-open source project and my teammate, Bruno Marchant, and I got the original author's permission to further open the code. We were excited to bring this cool functionality to even more users. Due to the growth of the project, Bruno and I have also had to open a support forum for users to get assistance with the extension and to allow them to file bug reports.
One thing I've really enjoyed about working on Expose Flash Gallery has been the fact that Google has supported the development by allowing me to work on the project during my 20% time. It has also been wonderful to work with all the great folks in Joomla! community that have come together to donate funds to this project to help defray server hosting costs. Best of all, it gave me the chance to meet Bruno, and the chances of me meeting another developer from Belgium would have been very slim outside of the tightly knit community that Joomla! has. I'd also like to extend my thanks to my former project partner, Steinþór Kristinsson, who has moved on from the project to focus on family. Both Bruno and Steinþór have been very helpful and their dedication to helping this project, all in their free time, has been inspirational to me.
Overall open source is a lot of fun - you just need to find the project and developer team that fits your interests and personal style. I think that if everyone, and there is always something for anyone to do, pitched on a project or two in their free time we'd see projects like Joomla! improve beyond their limits. Thanks for listening and enjoy the free stuff!
