I was excited to see a tweet go out last week about an exciting new Joomla Extensions offering by Cory Webb. I've long been a fan of Cory's work and was excited to see what he had put together. I've only had a chance to play with a few of the extensions so far, but from what I can see they are highly targeted extensions designed to fill a gap in the core Joomla functionality.

I really like this approach and so I decided to reach out to Cory directly to find out more about the inspiration behind his new project and his plans for 2016 ...

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At the end of last year, Jisse Reitsma published a new book called Programming Joomla Plugins. You may know of Jisse through his work at Yireo, the developers of the well known Joomla / Magento bridge extension called MageBridge.

Yireo have been around since the beginning of Joomla and have over 60 Joomla and Magento extensions in their catalogue.

While I eagerly wait for my copy of the book to to arrive, I thought I would ask Jisse a few questions to find out more about the book and in particular his motivation for writing the Programming Joomla Plugins.

Hi Jisse, nice to meet you. Can you tell us about your background? What is your experience in Joomla development?

As founder and lead developer of Yireo, I have been developing Joomla extensions since 2006 or so. I started building sites back in the Mambo days and once Joomla 1.0 got out, I started fiddling with the Joomla code to get things done.

As soon as Joomla 1.5 came out (alpha 2), I created my first MVC component and I have been focussing on writing extensions ever since.

Currently, extension development is my main task. Besides Joomla, Yireo also focuses on Magento, so I've developed quite a lot of Magento extensions as well.

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One of the great things about moving into my new studio space at the end of last year, was that I got to meet a whole new group of artists, designers, photographers and other creative types.

One of those designers is Glenn Thomas. Glenn put together the header and element design for our Joomla template release Arcadia and as you can see he is a seriously talented illustrator.

I wanted to get an idea of his workflow and design process so I asked him the following questions ...

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How long have you been a designer? Where did you study? What sort of work do you do?

Morning'. I've been a full-time freelancer for about 5 years now, originally in straight photo-manipulation artworks before venturing into Illustration & Animation about 2yrs ago. I did a very broad 2 year Diploma of Multimedia at RMIT TAFE, but essentially ended up self-teaching all of the skills I use today. Que obligatory reference to my online teaching class.

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Last week I announced a new partnership with Siteground as our preferred hosting providers. One of the key features of SiteGround's feature list for me is their focus on server security.

Server security, as you are probably aware, is an important but often misunderstood and overlooked part of running a website. There are a number of solutions out there for hardening a Joomla website and while most security experts will agree that making a Joomla website secure needs to be a multi-pronged process, nothing beats a secure hosting environment to begin with.

I recently had the chance to talk to Valeri from SiteGround to find out more about how SiteGround goes about securing their servers. Valeri was the key developer of the free SiteGround jHackGuard plugin which as you will read below is part of the SiteGround arsenal in their fight to keep your website secure.

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We have played with a number of different online project management services over the last few years - Basecamp, Lighthouse, Apollo and Assembla to name a few. Each time we have changed project tools it's signified a maturing of our workflow. From the early days when we just used Basecamp as a collection of todo lists to our current platform Assembla, which integrates our svn, ticket system and bug tracking.

I've been keenly following the progress of the Hot Project task management software for the last few years and while it's functionality in the past hasn't matched our needs, I think all of that is about to change.

The new Hot Project platform features some killer features including a fast user interface (my main gripe with Assembla at the moment), advanced scheduling tools, proforma project creation, document management and more.

So on the eve of the release of Hot Project live I thought I would chat to fellow Melbourne based developer Richard Smallwood to get a bit of insight into what drives Hot Project and where it is headed in what seems like an already crowded marketplace.

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RedShop is a relative new comer on the Joomla ecommerce scene but it's offerings are genuinely impressive. I had some direct contact with redShop when we built the Shop Ignition Joomla template back in March and I really liked what I saw.

The scale of the extension is incredible and the templating system has a good balance between separating the design from the code, which makes theming the shop a pleasure for the non coder.

The following interview with Ronni from Redcomponent has been on the back burner for a little longer than I would have liked but I hope you will agree that it makes for some good reading.

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A few days ago I posted a preview of the icon that I commissioned Parth Mohanraj to make for our Zen Grid framework and today I thought Id post a small interview with Parth so that you can learn more about this amazing designer. If you haven't already checked out his folio its well worth it. Read on for the interview.

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I recently had the chance to chat with John Coonen, one of the creators of Joomla Expo in Chicago earlier this year. It was a huge success from all reports, and when John mentioned that it was expanding into CMS Expo I was curious to hear more.

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