Open Source Content Management Systems and Choosing a Sitebuilder

In the episode, we have a discussion with Jason Nickerson, the current head of the Joomla Capital Team — a group of volunteers who lead the Joomla community.

We discuss different Content Management Systems: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla.

• Why Joomla?
• E-commerce options on Joomla
• Ecwid on Joomla

Transcript

Jesse: Richard, how is it going today?

Richard: It’s going great, I’m excited!

Jesse: Awesome, awesome, me too. We just had some lunch, and we are talking a little bit about today’s podcast. I think the reason I’m excited about today’s guest is that we’re working online, we work in e-commerce, so, a common question to people is like: “Where should I start? What site should I use to build this, here’s what I got to do?” Rich, I know you’re even going through this question right now?

Richard: Oh, yeah. It’s kind of that never-ending to go with the one that has all the feature sets that you might use someday, or do you just pick the one that has the feature set she needs right now and just get going and then adjust accordingly. We know that there’s those areas, those gray zones, where you kind of want to look ahead of time.

Jesse: Yeah.

Richard: But at the beginning, it’s daunting no matter what, for some people, right. Because, there are sites: WordPress, Joomla, like which one of these things do we grab?

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. I played with a bunch of these on my own and different, different sites for different reasons. So, I thought today we would present a real option for Ecwid store owners and other e-commerce people out there with our guest today. Today we have Jason Nickerson; he’s the head of the Capital Team on the Joomla leadership team. Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason: Hi guys, how are you doing?

Jesse: Awesome, good!

Richard: Welcome, Jason.

Jason: Thanks for having me!

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think we talked before the show here, you’ve been in e-commerce for how long now?

Jason: Oh, Gosh, probably about fourteen years, maybe fifteen or more.

Jesse: Okay, so you’ve had these same questions and people asking questions of you. “Where do I start, what platform should I use?”

Jason: Oh yeah. And this is, I mean, I started before there was WordPress or Joomla, really, you know. I’ve been starting with an open source shopping cart that was very difficult; it wasn’t like things are today, you know, I mean, we all look at, like, page builders and things like that. We’ve all become very accustomed to uploading a plugin or extension with a zip file. Back then, you had to do the core editing of the code just to add features to it, which was a great start for me to get into and actually understand, you know, some of the programming languages and things that happened with e-commerce.

Jesse: So you know the code, you’re like an old school here of e-commerce.

Jason: Yeah!

Richard: What was it that actually prompted Joomla? Did you see something in WordPress, that you saw an opening and wanted to take advantage of it with Joomla? What was the inspiration?

Jason: I basically started, I had spent a lot of time in the music industry. I had a brick-and-mortar record store back in the day, I’d worked in some media, I have done some ANR for some large people and I kind of wanted to transition, and I saw like a big opening when the MP3 Market came out.

And, I was basically into some dance music, and at the time there were some major players that were popping up, like (B-port) and some other download store. So, I started a digital record label, and I started it with osCommerce in PHP-Nuke. And, at that point, after I built the site I was working on it, I have a lot of people asking me to build websites. I really never wanted to get into the website building industry, because I just really knew that just about everybody’s brother or cousin could build a website. And, I didn’t think there was a big market that I wanted to get into.

So, I started actually doing some sites for people, and I came upon a situation, where I needed something larger than what I was doing. So, I did a little bit of research, and this was about the mid-2000s, and WordPress at the time was really just straight a blog, you know. There weren’t a lot of plugins, wasn’t e-commerce for it yet, I don’t believe at that time. And, it was my solution was for a real estate site and I actually just googled something, and I found out there was a solution for Joomla and having some experience with a PHP-Nuke or another content-management-system, I was able to spend that side up in about a week, and I was very impressed with the features of Joomla, because again at that time WordPress was really out there pushing itself as a blogging platform, there was a huge ecosystem and Joomla actually has a vast ecosystem at that point it was really just driving, because Joomla had only been around for a couple years, and it needed all of these different features and stuff.

So, I started building stuff with Joomla and then I started my own company based around Joomla, making Joomla templates and extensions. And it is kind of funny on this, I believe, this month is the 13th year of Joomla, and some 10th year of my company making Joomla templates and extensions. And, the funny thing that a lot of people don’t know about on some of these open source projects, such as WordPress and Joomla, is that they started as what it’s called a “fork.”

And, open source project is basically on open source code and is free, meaning you can download it for free, you can edit it for free, and as long as you leave the copyright and place you can take the whole code base and own creation things. So, today if I wanted to say: “Well, I don’t really like what Joomla is doing and I’ve got eight people programs together, and I want to start Boomla, all I have to do is copy a Joomla code and leave the copyright place, called Boomla, and we’re good to go. And that’s how WordPress started, WordPress was a B2B blog, I believe. And, then a map forted over, and then WordPress came along, and Joomla is the same thing, it used to be called Mambo. And leadership said:” OK, let’s do Joomla.” Mambo went away, I think it’s still around, but it’s never been as big as Joomla was because we got a lot of good leadership in there and stuff.

Jesse: Wow. So, I heard of Mambo before, and Joomla’s been around a long time now, but. So, it sounds like back in that early day, it was, like, you know, it was the main platform for building, you know, slightly more complex websites, is that fair?

Jason: Yes, yeah, yeah. It was really the solution if you wanted a true content management solution. It wasn’t done, WordPress really wasn’t even, like, called a blog, even if, you know, look this up in a way-back machine when it started, it was just a publishing platform. And, it really was the whole ecosystem that people were making plugins for it, that expanded into this monster to the bet is today, I mean, I really have no idea that WordPress was going to dominate how it has, you know, and that’s because of couple factors, they have wordpress.com, where you can start your own blog, but WordPress powers so much of the internet, it’s amazing.

You can look at trends and stuff and see how Joomla was neck-and-neck with WordPress and Drupal was kind of at the bottom, because the people that don’t know Drupal, Drupal is a source, or an open source content management system. But, you really need to be a coder to get a program, it’s really a deep learning curve, and that’s kind of going towards the enterprise level now. Drupal’s more interested in government’s jobs and more enterprise-level whereas Joomla and WordPress are more accessible to the end user. And now there’s just, it’s so amazing, what can be done with open source, I like to tell people on, you know, Joomla is gonna rave for version four right now, WordPress is version five, I believe Joomla puts out about three or four updates a year and a WordPress about the same.

And you could have this large tech company, say, a Microsoft and Internet Explorer and things. You see how it takes to update, even just common known bugs and stuff. And by doing it with open source and a team of volunteers, who are really passionate about the project, you can get a lot done quickly.

Jesse: Yeah, it’s amazing that. So, all those amazing updates that you’re talking about, that’s all volunteer work from volunteer coders around the world, is that the case?

Jason: Yeah, that is the interesting thing about Joomla, we’ve got over 1300 volunteers and, again Joomla is distinctly different than WordPress and Drupal, because WordPress, Matt has a company called “Аutomattic,” and that’s, you know, they’ve got start-up money, they’ve had millions of dollars to promote WordPress, and they’re actually a company. And they have a full leadership, whereas Acquia does Drupal. And they are as well already full company, Joomla, we have a corporation called opening source matters, and that’s just there, because we have to have a leadership team to take care of the trademark and things like that, but everybody from the president to the coders, to the guy, who writes a documentation, to the person, who’s on the Forum, they’re all volunteers.

Jesse: And that includes the guy on a podcast as well, right?

Jason: Yes it is! But that’s a unique thing too. Most of these volunteers, we do this, because we want Joomla to be better and we do have a passion for Joomla and we all kind of work within the Joomla thing. People ask me all the time about my volunteer status; I tell them that. Well, honestly if somebody come up to me 10 years ago and said: “Hey, would you like to work in a project that is going to have, you know, a hundred million downloads, there is going to be 13 hundred or more people working with you, it’s going to have power 3% of the internet, and it’s going to be just awesome thing, but you’re never going to get paid.” I probably would have laughed and walked away. It took me a little to actually start with the community, I probably ran my company blindly, you know, making money off of Joomla for about six to seven years before I decided that I wanted to go ahead and volunteer my time to try to help Joomla and make Joomla a better product.

Jesse: Got it. So, you’re making money off of this is like extensions and themes, is that the main?

Jason: Yeah, my company JoomlaXTC — Extension Template Club. We started off making just little plugins for it and the great thing about Joomla as it has the extension directory and things. And, after doing e-commerce some selling MP3s for $0.99, I’m setting up some e-commerce stores. I know how long it takes for, when you put a product up online and, in especially back in the early 2000s wasn’t this really hardcore SEO and stuff, you had to, you know, it took a couple of months, when you put some brand new online, unless you had a lot of money for advertising.

So, I own that round and seeing things, you know, slowly take off, but it was amazing to me when we started the company, we put up a couple things on the Joomla extension directory, and they just were selling and selling, and the money was growing and then we started moving in a templates, and I was just shocked, you know, when the first month, when we put something online, we probably sold at least 150 products and not knowing how this digital download thing works, because, you know, we are selling a JPL and open source product, and it’s a digital download and you know the problem that people had with the media, and stuff people pirating stuff. I had no expectations for the long-term sales of it, but we did, like, an MP3 player, capped out it about 30,000 or 40,000 downloads within the first year. Yeah, unbelievable.

Jesse: They were looking for what you made and they’re paying, you know, could people give it to their buddy and be like: “Check out this software!” It was at like something you worried about at that time?

Jason: Yeah, you’re always worried about it in all honesty I believe that up before I even knew about Dremel extension clubs and things like that and template clubs, I think my buddy brought over a DVD and said: “Hey, I got this off a Torrent, check it out!” I started looking at these things and I went: “O, this is actually a company, company, called Joomla.” And I said: “Oh, I have to do this!”

The great thing about, if you been a, you know, somebody who does websites, you know, templates have been really taking over for the last ten years, they kinda have been the go to. And most Joomla template clubs, you know, we offer you a year worth of new templates + the back catalogue, which most of them, like, at least a hundred, so for $99 a year you can get, you know, 120 templates and when a started doing web design with Joomla, I mean, that was a great resource for me, and I was just going and signing up and, you know, that’s the subscription model, that is really taking over, you know, right now subscription boxes and things like that, that’s really huge and that’s something whereas being a Joomla developer for years, you know, I’ve got very used to the subscription model, because most companies use that.

Jesse: So, let me take a step back, so for any listeners, people are newer to the internet and how it works. Can you describe what a theme is for, this is for somebody that never heard of a theme. Can you define it for them?

Jason: Sure, sure. In WordPress, it called themes, in Joomla they called templates. I have no idea why we decided to call them templates and not themes.

Jesse: Is this a kinda like a little battle between WordPress and Joomla, like, just gonna call things different, you know.

Jason: I think in the beginning. So, what theme or template is it’s a pre-designed website. So, if you need a website to sell on sneakers with Ecwid, you could go and just look for a Joomla theme or a Joomla template for shoe sales or for t-shirts sales or, you know, if you need a law office, I mean, the theme clubs are been going now for, I guess, probably about 10 years. So, I don’t think there’s really anything out there that you’re going to be selling online that you can’t find a theme for.

Jesse: Sure, and so far, you know, for people that are unaware, you know, yeah you can search for a theme or template and whatever you want it’s going to be all the nice pictures are there. So, you know, of course you want your own pictures, you want your own text in there, but yeah, if you would like: “I sell sneakers, I need a sneaker theme.” You can start there, and, you know, you replace those pictures over time but at least the content and the pictures match. It’s a very good start, I guess,.

Jason: Yeah, it is a quick start and I’m even like season web developers for themes nowadays, because not necessarily that I’m going to look for a certain on a theme for a shoe store, but, you know, I can just start to look and see what themes I like and what theme that might actually suit my needs, because as we know, as you seeing pictures, that’s really background images and the demo content that define what the website is about. So, it’s more about picking the layouts and stuff, this has really been a huge go-to for marketing agencies, because they can quickly put on a theme or a template and there’s, I think, it’s a Theme Forest has made a just a killing on this with a WordPress stuff and some of the WordPress things and after just ridiculous with, like, you download one theme, you’ve got a hundred different styles of landing pages, I’ve just scratched my head — wow, that most of taking month.

Jesse: Yeah it is a pretty, amazing it’s amazing shortcut for people, that are just getting started online that, you know, I think people have this idea like: “Wow, I’m going to start my site, it’s going to be hard, I’m going to have to get a developer, I’m going to have to code.” And not really. Somebody’s already done the work, a theme developer, a theme author you know somebody like yourself is already did all the hard work and yes, you need to customize it afterwards, but It is really easy to get started online.

Jason: Yeah and it’s for me a just getting easier, I mean, with the domination recently of Wix and Squarespace, you know. A Wix has been around for years and years, but as technology changes, you know, it got better. I think when it started it was using Flash and things, now that Flash is gone, you know, it’s, and CSS3 and all the advancements in the web have made it a really easy experience now with drag-and-drop and things like that.

That’s really translating over as well into a Joomla and into WordPress. I mean WordPress is about to release Gutenberg, which is an editor, in which you can easily, you know, add blocks of content and pre-designed layouts just with drag-and-drop. Some of the larger template clubs of Joomla like, JoomShaper, they have, what they called a “template framework” and that’s something that really took off in the last 8 years that we’re all, we’re really trying to do, we’re trying to build a quote framework for our users, where you could go into the backend with of the administrator of Joomla and the template area and change the colors of the website, change the website images do all of this without touching one line of  code. That’s was one of the largest things that have been happening, but now a lot of these people, like, JoomShaper I believe, You Theme the built it into their themes, where they have this integrated page builder and the drag-and-drop experience. So, when you’re using a template now on, for JoomShaper, you don’t have to go into the back-end at all, you can do all of your editings, just like Wix or Squarespace, right on the front-end, so. I think that the page builders are really revolutionizing things, you know, templates revolutionized things ten years ago.

Jesse: I personally know just enough code to screw things up.

Richard: It’s like my Spanish.

Jesse: Yeah! And I like: “Oh, I can probably delete this line. Oh, ups!” It’s awesome to hear that, like, Joomla is able to take from the site builders, right. Wix and Squarespace, they’re making this super easy too, I mean, it’s easy, right. You just log in, and you start on the site, if Joomla can now adapt that, I see a big future there, that’s awesome.

Jason: Yeah, it’s huge, and it’s something that needs to happen. I mean, I’m giving a talk at the upcoming cPanel conference in October, and I’m just talking about page builders, because that’s really where it’s going and the thing about the page builders too is that, you know, these proprietary systems, like Wix and Squarespace, yeah, they are great, and they are wonderful, but they have taken out a whole industry of the small business for, say, Joomla; or, since they do their own hosting, hosting companies are not getting that, and, I mean, one of the big thing hosting companies, is not allowed to do huge enterprise stuff, they really just share hosting, as probably, you know, where the money is for them. So, I really see in the next five or ten years a dramatic change, and I look at it now, and going: “If we can do this now, these page builders and things…” There’s couple content management systems now, that are like an app, you can download it and you can do it on your computer, what happens, when, you know, Apple just include your website and use the iCloud to store your information, and yeah, it’s a dramatic change, it’s about to happen, I think.

Jesse: For sure, and, you know, where do you see it headed, I mean do you see those Wix’s and Weebly’s and Squarespace’s taking over a good chunk of that market?

Jason: Yeah, to start off with, and I think it’s really, a lot of people like inside the open-source communities are really nervous about this. There is a cause to be nervous but, we as the open-source communities, we need to develop tools, that can do things like that, but what we have to understand is that, you know, there’s so many people need to get online and if it gets them online by setting up there and see the restaurant or whatever if, a Wix and Squarespace, they can do your website, they can do you a, like an online business card for your website, but, you know, when it comes to, say, 3 to 5 years down the line with your company, you know, what happens when you need to do something that they’re not doing? I know that they’re looking at the Content Management Systems. I know there’s going to become more robust. But, I think, you know, what I tell a lot of people that I know that do web design, that are really nervous and this, I said: “Well, really?” What they’re getting is, they’re getting the small client, who can’t afford your time, that’s the client that you probably really don’t want, because they want a lot, not willing to pay you a lot and if they can’t do it themselves, because I have friends of mine that have tried to use Squarespace and they’re not web designers, can you just build it for me. And that’s great, but it’s kind of like a proving ground now, because so many people have an idea, and they put it online, and it either works or it doesn’t. So, if it works, then at the end of that, then you have everything you need to take over, because if something that takes off in 2 years with a Wix or whatever people want a custom theme design, they’re going to want some customization that, you know, maybe Wix isn’t available to do, and already then you they have the site branded, they have income, they have all the content, they have everything necessary, you know, for a web developer to build the site.

Jesse: That’s interesting, that’s good, good take on it that. These easy DIY options are really just expanding the market, that there’s now more people can get online and, you know, like you said, they prove themselves, they prove they can make a little money now they got there enough money to pay a developer to take it to the next level, perhaps.

Jason: Right.

Jesse: So is that where you see Joomla, is that when Joomla comes in in that. Okay, maybe it’s not as easy as Squarespace, for instance, but if it’s not that much harder and if you want to build it for the long haul, this might be a better option?

Jason: Yeah I see it is that, because Joomla has a lot of interesting features that, you know, maybe these website builders might not have. Joomla is now in 75 different languages and that includes some different dialects and stuff. It is the the largest multilingual CMS that’s out there. It has a lot of the core stuff built into it. And Joomla is always been looked at as in the big three of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. WordPress is always the easiest, Joomla was, you know, a little bit harder, you need to understand a little more and then Drupal, no it’s way too hard. And, I think Joomla had got a real name for being more difficult, because there were more options inside of Joomla.

Let’ say the blog. WordPress is very easy, you have a few options, when you look at Joomla you’ve got maybe 40 different options, do you want to show the date, do you want to show tags, do you want to do this, do you want to do that. It’s ridiculous how many options there are. It can be a little daunting, when you have more menu items than, you know, another CMS it can look a little daunting, but once you actually use the system and realize that the power that it has, you know, it’s a lot better and we’re actually moving toward Joomla 4, I think Joomla 4 will be out hopefully by the end of the year, if not — at the beginning of the year. It’s a complete overhaul of the on the back end of Joomla as far as the UX team has worked for a few years and settled on a better look for the administration, for better, for worse I’m not going to say it looks more like WordPress, it looks like Joomla but things are arranged a little more, you know, under a standardization. It’s going to be a lot more accessible for a lot more people.

Jesse: Got it. So, if people logging in for the first time to Joomla, they’re not going to be as overwhelmed as they might be right now where maybe that’s where that’s where the reputation came from?

Jason: Yeah, and with anything, I mean, anything somebody’s just starting out, it’s just a software program and that’s one thing people need to understand is that you’re not going to break everything. Try this menu link, see what this does, do that, I think most people now, I think that thing is really happening now, it’s just amazing to me is that, all these kids, all the stuff going on on tech, all these startups, all these young people that have grown up with the internet, with actually the internet being a thing. So, they don’t remember a time before, they’re not scared at all. They’re doing crazy stuff.

Jesse: That’s awesome. So is there any sneak peek on Joomla for the chicken talk about or is it a little hush hush?

Jason: Yeah, no, it’s available on the Joomla magazine on the Joomla.org, you can look up Joomla 4, there’s some screenshots. I believe with Joomla.org which are, it’s a launch.joomla.org, we just did that. It’s make sure it’s that: launch.joomla.org, that is where you can go ahead and set up a free Joomla site and from there I believe you can go ahead and Install the Alpha version of Joomla 4 and test it out and get some more or less It’s just a preview for our extension developers, because we really found in the past, you know, we had a few problems going from Joomla 1 to Joomla 2 with doing some big code changes and breaking things for extension developers. That’s happened probably about close to 8 years ago, but it is still kind of a sticking point with people. So, we’re trying to be very open with the decoding of Joomla and letting everybody know way in advance about what it’s going to do if it’s going to break anything and let people test, because that’s the worst thing to have is to have a website and you update to the new version of the software and it breaks everything. That’s really where Ecwid it’s a Wonderful solution for Joomla.

Jesse: For sure, I mean, one thing about Joomla is it’s not really known as an e-commerce platform, it says it’s a content management system so, you know, let’s talk about Ecwid inside of Joomla. You’ve been able to play with it a little bit. Do you have any early feedback on us?

Jason: Yeah, I think it’s a great system, you know there’s quite a lot of shopping carts out there for Joomla. One of the largest ones is called VirtueMart. It’s been around since probably close to the beginning of Joomla and it was a very robust system back when I was using it and I downloaded it I think I downloaded a couple-hundred-page document with all the directions and instructions which I printed them out and put them in a large binder that doesn’t happen to pay.

Jesse: You didn’t walk away and say: “Oh, man, not about this.”

Jason: No, it was an e-commerce solution that I wanted to use but unfortunately I was talking about you know upgrades and stuff and done the greatest job in their upgrades and it’s a free extension many people still use it but at this point, no it’s not the go to, what are the “go to” his right now is called J2Store, and that started as a very simple thing of inside of your blog content adding a shopping cart, and that allows for some pretty interesting things to you could go in if you know basic HTML you can create your product page very customized. About doing any kind of overrides or anything and that’s really growing to a very robust system.

But I think where Ecwid really shines is on the future of e-commerce. You know one of the things with Ecwid is that since it is you know a software-as-a-service type of platform and it’s just a plug-in that you install into Joomla and then it pulls in all of the all the products from Ecwid into Joomla. You don’t have to worry about if there are some conflicts a with some JavaScript or CSS or whatever from what I found on everything works great. I kind of been trimming it as Ecwid is multi-platform for e-commerce, so if I have a client that has a WordPress site and wants to convert it to Joomla there is no worries and if they’re using your platform because all I have to do is install the plugin put in their code and I’ve got their store inside of Joomla. So, the ability to move it like that you know and you don’t have to worry about if Joomla 4 has some compatibility issues with other shopping carts. You’re going to be fine there you know. That’s the number one thing that I really love about the system.

Jesse: Yeah I think that’s something that, for people that use downloadable software, open-source. There are updates, right that there are when the next update comes there are patches and downloads and such. That might be fine for your CMS but man, you don’t really want your store to break. When things going wrong at least let me continue to make money well, while problems get fixed. So, I think that’s a big thing.

Jason: Exactly and I think some of the real benefits are things that you’ve got are rolling out with selling your stuff on Instagram, Amazon just all these social network platforms. I’ve got a client that I’ve been building up a site for her and I was thinking about using the J2Store for Joomla and I had to actually sit down and have a conversation with her and find out: “Do you want to sell your products on Facebook and Instagram and do you want to have a point-of-sale option? Do you want to have an app?” And these are the conversations that I really can’t have with my client with say on the J2Store whatever.

Sure Joomla is robust and there are a lot of third-party extensions there’s a lot of ways that I can customize it. If somebody wanted me to use shopping cart and add this feature now that feature, I could do that, but by using Ecwid, you’ve got it all built in. It just comes down to you know making them understand that in the long-term this is going to be better for you. I might be able to find a cheaper solution than you paying you know the $39 and $99 a month or whatever monthly, but, that kind of assures that, you’re always going to have the latest update. It’s not going to break and you have all of these wonderful features. I mean, can’t tell you how much I would charge somebody for a shopping cart app after I built that app or J2Store it would be a lot more than what they would pay to actually use the Ecwid system.

Jesse: I think that’s the thing is people look at that: “Well this one’s free, and I can just download it, right.” That’s free, well yeah, it’s free, but how much is your time worth. Richard, do you have some questions?

Richard: There was actually, I mean, there’s like three things I was going to say, just don’t want to interrupt you. You kind of answered some of this already but I would just ask straight to the point, if someone is starting from scratch right now and they’re looking for CMS, why Joomla?

Jason: Why Joomla. Well Joomla is, like I said it’s the number 2 content management system out there. It is open-source, there are thousands of people worldwide that can help you and we have training videos on the website if you go to the website and you go to discover and learn. We have full documentation and training, there’s blogs and you can basically we have user groups all around the world so it’s very easy to look up a user group and go to a meetup and ask for help. so there’s always out like that. Using it because it’s not WordPress, hey that’s really your decision. I’m more or less an open-source evangelist so if you are using WordPress and you like WordPress — continue to use WordPress. If you’re using WordPress and you want some more features and you want a little more control over say the code then check out Joomla. But it’s really what you feel comfortable with and, like I said, I downloaded for the first time and I already use a content management platform and I fell in love with it. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty a little bit then Joomla is a great thing because we use a what’s called an MVC model. Basic people won’t understand that, but it’s a Model View Controller, so basically all the layouts the Joomla builds for the pages, it’s all editable inside of the template to where, if you want to change where the title of the article is above the image you can go in a very clean layout and look at that do that and, do that without actually doing any core override that’s something that WordPress doesn’t have, if you need to update WordPress, you need to customize in any way. You’re opening the code and I know that most people that don’t do blogs and don’t ever look at the code in WordPress — it’s great. But I’ve had some experiences with WordPress and it’s you have to go in and make a PHP file if you want to have a sidebar on one page or not another page. For the basic user, it’s kind of easy too because it’s very well-documented on a WordPress site. But it’s very confusing that just have a sidebar, you have to make this code when Joomla it use its modules, and you can define per menu what’s on this side or what’s on that sidebar. And, I’d say if you want multilingual, go with Joomla. That would be my number one is the multilingual features.

Jesse: So, yeah, let’s talk about international as well. So, I know at least I understood the Joomla might be stronger internationally may be like in the Latin American World or is there areas where Joomla has actually the bigger install base?

Jason: Europe. I would say that probably the largest contributions from coders are in Germany. We have a huge community in Italy and Africa, on things are we outside of a very large presence because Africa is a unique situation because they’re just technological enough to have some really cool advancements, but It’s running around with the latest smartphone. They have some flip phones and conversation of how do e-commerce on flip phones they figured that out, it’s moving forward, and we have a lot of good people that I think it is, I think on September 14th and 15th is Joomla day Kenya. And I think right now is Joomla day Brazil, this weekend. So, we have these things called Joomla days, the more or less conference is where you can go and meet the people with the team and you can learn about developing with Joomla. Joomla days happen I’d say just about every month around the world.

Jesse: That’s a good time to meet people that can help developers probably with business contacts and things like that.

Jason: Oh, definitely. It’s great because the conference is more or less divided into a couple different sections. I mean the goal is to inform people about Joomla and give people who don’t know a lot about it, give them a good basics and let them know of things that they should be doing and things they shouldn’t be doing. For intermediate people, it gives a great time to learn more about Joomla. The networking is fantastic, I think that going to a Joomla day is essential if you’re inside of Joomla because you get to meet so many people and especially if you’re somebody that if your are developer it’s great because you know you really don’t know who else is out there and what they’re doing until you know you get to sit down and find out and you know you might find your next business partner or you know your next team member.

Jesse: Yeah that’s perfect. I think that is a good reminder to entrepreneurs out there in the online world. You think you can just make everything from your office you know you can make magic from your office alone but it is good to get out there to meet people and talk to people and do happy hour.

Richard: Well sounds like you just want to get a happy hour, Jess. I was just saying, there is something about that open-source community to your answer to the question a minute ago. Was, when it’s open source it just seems as if there’s a little more element of a community aspect to a community feel more people want to help out?

Jason: Oh, yeah! Because it’s a passion, I mean it really is a passion. I’ve been doing a Joomla day in Tampa, it’s Joomla day Florida. I’ve been doing that for 3 years now. We get over a hundred people and I do it normally in February or March which it’s kind of cold up North so a lot of people come from up North and we have people come from you know, Europe from last year we had Israel and Haiti and, many different areas and all come together and you know, like Jesse, I do like the after party, that is so nice.

Jesse: I wasn’t harassed at him in a bad way!

Richard: It is Friday, you know.

Jason: I just I really at this point, I love bringing new people into Joomla, it happens everyone, but you know, the Joomla people kind of like a family to me, so. I really like when I get the speaker’s come over and people that you know I haven’t seen in a year and I was so that’s why, so I like going to these events to more less then just hang out with all my friends now.

Jesse: Awesome. I hope we can bring some more Ecwid people into the Joomla community. I know it’s actually pretty big chunk of our business as well. I think maybe because there aren’t that many there’s really no hosted carts in the Joomla world and so Ecwid fulfills that need. I’m hoping more people at Joomla can hear about Ecwid and make their e-commerce lives easier at least. So, yeah, I appreciate your time here. So, Jason, where can our listeners find out more about you?

Jason: They can find out more about me… they can follow me on Twitter is @jjoomla on Twitter. You can find out more about me on the Joomla website: Joomla.org under the community volunteer portal. You can look up the Joomlers that’s where everybody in Joomla is listed and my company is again is a JoomlaXTC.com. I’m also hosting a CMS Summit coming up on March the 14th to the 16th in Disney Springs Orlando, which we will be talking about Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Ecwid, and BoldGrid, many different options for Content Management Solutions.

Jesse: Awesome! So everybody check out those options for Joomla. Particular that you’re looking for something with little more options for the future, that’s a perfect choice for you, so, Jason really appreciate it, Richard.

Richard: Thanks, Jason.

Jason: Thank you!