Hi Merav, tell us a bit about yourself and iJoomla

Merav Knafo, CEO

I’ve been a software developer for 10 years, I started a few companies before iJoomla.com, one of them was a dating site, and the other was a site that provides photography services for online daters (www.lookbetteronline.com). So before Joomla I had a lot of background creating web applications for myself, but not for mass use. Also because I was working in small teams, I had to wear a lot of hats like marketing, SEO, etc.

How did you start with Joomla and what is your background?

I was familiar with Mambo, the CMS Joomla forked off. I thought it was great! I also thought I could bring some value with my product design experience. So after Joomla was born, when a client asked me to create a magazine for him, I tried to do it with Joomla, but it didn’t look too good, so I decided to create my first extension – iJoomla magazine. It was an over-night success, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Did you get to work with other CMS and what did you think about them?

I tried to work with Drupal but found it very hard to use. I had a talk with Drupal founder a few months ago at the CMS expo, and he told me they are doing extensive usability Testing on the new version of Drupal, so I can’t wait to see how much they improved it. I also worked with WordPress, and liked it, but never had the time to really learn it properly.

The competition abroad is extreme, what made you choose the international market over the Israeli market? Have you tried working in the Israeli market?

On the internet, there is no such thing as “international” or “local” when it comes to creating web applications. It’s all just “the web”. I could have created Joomla Extensions sitting in Israel or in China, but I’ve chosen California as my home. Plus, I am not really afraid of competition. Competition is what makes everybody better. If you have no competitors you become lazy and stupid.

In the past few years hundreds of companies started offering services for Joomla, what are your strategies for dealing with competition? Is it SEO? Social Media?

We try to do it better. We put a lot of effort in creating user-friendly and feature-rich extensions that are also well-documented. We do a lot of QA to ensure as little bugs as possible. We created video tutorials and place a link to the video tutorial right on the feature on the component backend. We listen to our customers. Our customers know they can post suggestions on our forum and we implement many of them, if they make sense of course, which they often do. We have 3 dedicated support people who are available to help with any issues our customers have, support is very important to us.

And yes, we do the whole social media thing, just like everybody else. Trying to be on top of what people are saying about us and address issues if they come up.

The need for different extensions is vast. What is your decision making process regarding which extension to develop? Is it a one-person decision, do you do any market research?

We don’t have a real sophisticated process for choosing which extension to create. The decision is mine and is based on customers demand and also our own needs. For example, iJoomla SEO, iJoomla DigiStore and iJoomla Magazine were all created because we needed these solutions for our own use, as it turned out, many others needed them too.

Do you provide any other services other than Joomla extensions?

Not at this point, not enough manpower.

For the upcoming Joomla 1.6, what kind of features would you like to see?

I would like to see a lot more user friendly interface, so that when a developer hands a Joomla site to a client, the customer can handle it by himself without too much difficulty.

What are you plans for the future? are there any new extensions you’re working on?

We are working on an Joomla LMS extension (Learning Management System), that is very powerful and useful. We also have other things cooking, but they are top secret at this time.

Winning the Best App Developer for Joomla!

The CMS Expo in Chicago was amazing. It’s always amazing but this year was really special: iJoomla won the award for “Best App Developer for Joomla”!

That’s a fantastic feeling and it really is great to be acknowledged. We owe a big thanks to everyone in the Joomla community and especially to our customers who keep sending us their ideas for improvements. Winning an award is inspiring but nothing pushes us harder than seeing what you’re doing with our products.

And it was also great to see our friends at JomSocial taking home the prize for “Best Joomla App.” Not unexpected but totally deserved!

How I almost won an iPad

Joomla hosting service, Rochen, created a major buzz at the Expo by giving away an iPad for the best picture of a penguin. They have a penguin on their logo and they’re quite keen on the little birds. Participants had to take a picture of the penguin somewhere at the CMS Expo. The results were very entertaining.

During a networking evening that included a lot of drinks, I was able to gather the nerve to ask Drupal founder Dries if he would allow me to take a picture of him holding a sign saying “Joomla Rocks” with the penguin in the picture. As I told someone, I’ve wanted an iPad all my life. The result is shown here, and it created its own buzz among the Joomla community.

Dries Buytaert - Joomla Rocks!

My entry got the most votes but didn’t win. The final decision was made by Ryan Ozimek, President of OSM, who chose a photo of a penguin eating sushi. Like penguins know how to use chopsticks! But it was a cute picture, and a really fun competition.

The winning penguin

Usability Testing  can be fun!

On Monday, I gave a presentation about Usability Testing, which went pretty well except for a few technology hiccups. And the following day, I put on a Usability Testing workshop. We tested four different sites, with one of the participants acting as either the tester or the facilitator in each round. The sites tested belonged to the participants and were chosen randomly.

The workshop was very enjoyable and everybody participated. We learned, laughed, learned some more, had a great time — and made the sites better too, I hope.

Usability Testing Workshop

You can see a video of the test we ran on JomSocial.com in the video below. There were some very surprising findings in this test, and the JomSocial team are already putting them straight.

A new template framework

I also had the pleasure of meeting Cory Webb, the author of “Beginning Joomla! Web Site Development.” He’s working on a very cool template framework called motif, and he gave me a little demo that was very impressive. You can see it here: http://themeables.com/motif

RocketTheme RTL feature makes a difference to RTL devs

And I had a chance to talk to Andy Miller from RocketTheme.com. His Gantry framework has full RTL support and a ton of other neat features. It has been a very much needed feature for all the RTL developers out there.

JoomlaShack has a new king

JoomlaShacks‘ new owner Eddie Tabush, a business man to the core, brought the entire JoomlaShack team with him. It was great to see them contemplating new ways for world domination, keeping the legacy left by Barrie North alive.

A reservations system that works on any CMS?

Rob Lock from ResMania.com, is coming out with a new version of their reservation system. It looks really amazing, with drag and drop layouts and more. They’ve spent a lot of time creating a framework that allows this system to work on any CMS, not just Joomla. Currently it works on both Joomla and Drupal and more to come.

The anti-framework template club

The team from JoomlaPraise was there too. They’re committed to being the anti-framework template club with templates that are beautiful and simple. I salute them for not following trends and doing what they do best: creating simple and elegant templates.

The CMS Expo was a well organized by John and Linda Coonen, and I thank them for pulling off yet another successful event.

I hope to see you there next year!