iJoomla Magazine is an excellent extension that has vastly improved the CMS
experience for publishers using Joomla. The component has undergone a
great deal of development since its first releases, and has been given
a big thumbs-up by critics as well us developers and publishers. PHP Magazine Network contacted Merav Knafo, iJoomla's founder, for an interview about the iJoomla experience.
1- Merav, why do publishers need iJoomla Magazine?
Because Joomla may be great for blogs, but not everyone wants a site
that looks like a blog! When I started with Joomla, I tried to use core
Joomla and was always disappointed with the result. It looked okay but
it just didn't give me the slick look I was after. That's why I've
created iJoomla Magazine. It allows you to make your site appear really
professional and clean.
2- Was Joomla the perfect platform to run and build your solutions?
Joomla is a powerful CMS
and has millions of fans; in that respect it was perfect for us. It's
also been a lot of fun to work with an enthusiastic group of people,
like the Joomla Community.
3- What do you think about other open source CMS systems such as Drupal, ezPublish and XOOPS?
I personally haven't used any of them. I started with Mambo and was
hooked; I didn't need to look any further. From what I hear though,
Joomla is more powerful and robust than the others and it has much
bigger variety of extensions and templates.
4- As your project name is related to Joomla, are there any
plans to make your solutions available for other platforms in the
future?
We don't plan to move into other platforms simply because maintaining
different versions of our component would probably be too hard. We are
not Microsoft, after all (yet)! I would much rather focus on one niche
and do it right rather than expand to other platforms and do a mediocre
job. I also feel that Joomla has the brightest future of all the
platforms, especially because of the strong community and the thousands
of developers involved.
