Interview with Matt Baylor and Tessa Merro this week talking about their work in the Joomla! Extension Directory (JED) and how they got into the Joomla! Community.
I also have a look at the Extension Directory eco system and how developers make money from selling extensions on the JED. Joomla! allows many opportunities to make money and start a business and one of the most popular ways is to sell extensions.
News round up from around the world including J and Beyond 2014.
Show Notes
We have our 50th episode coming up, so join us on a Google Hangout to celebrate this. You can find us at 10am on Saturday morning AEST.
J and Beyond is coming up on May 30th - June 1st 2014 in Germany. Brian Teeman has put together the website for the conference. I will be interviewing Robert Deutz in regards to the J and beyond conference. It will be great to finally have him on the podcast and to have a chat with him. Check out the website and buy tickets if you are interested in website development.
In the templating world, my favourite template provider, JoomlaArt have released their flagship free template - Purity III. Which works off the brand new T3 framework with Bootstrap 3. It is available for developers and you can download it from their website. It is a fantastic base template, you can use it to build almost any kind of website.
Stay tuned for a whole bunch of training videos in regards to T3 and how to use it effectively.
Last week I mentioned Bluehost were disabling Joomla! 1.5 sites. Michael Babker has put out a blogpost to set the record straight on Joomla! 1.5 and he also has written a blogpost on raising the bar on security.
How to Make Money with Joomla!
As you may or may not know, you can extend Joomla!'s functionality with a range of extensions which can include forums, slideshows and a whole range of other options. Developers have created different types of extensions to fulfil people's needs when creating websites.
I was inspired by a conversation I had with Mark Lee at the Joomla World Conference and how his company made money by selling extensions online to the community. I have started up my own extension shop, Niche Extensions, and it is interesting to see how much traffic it is getting and how many people actually buy the extensions. I only make about $5 per sale on an extension, but when sales are building up over a day, it adds up quickly.
So how are other people making money through Joomla? Is template building popular? How about service providers and site builders? What is the most lucrative in the market? That is what I am going to find out.
Through this series of podcast episodes, I will be investigating this by talking to experts in the community to find out where you should start depending on your skills and where you want to target yourself. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast to keep up with this segment of the podcast.
I believe a lot of traffic to Niche Extensions comes from the Joomla Extensions Directory, this is why I wanted to interview Tessa and Matt from the JED team to talk about the JED and their experiences.
Interview with Tessa and Matt
We welcome Matt and Tessa from the Joomla Extensions Directory team.
Matt found Joomla! in early 2007 when doing a personal project and from there fell in love with being able to do stuff on his own. He started on freelance work and went to design school and went from there.
Tessa started with her current employer in September 2011 and was looking for a business solution for them to migrate out of classic ASP, when she found the OStraining website. Went to a training course and learned how to build a site in one day. Then went to Joomla Day in New York, and was introduced into the community and from there was addicted.
Both are volunteers on the JED team, which is one of the most popular sites within the Joomla! site. Right now there are 7500 listed extensions, on average 10 million page views a month, 1.2 million unique visitors a month and recently a server move was implemented to accommodate the growth in traffic.
The JED is a key part of the Joomla! ecosystem for business, and developers rely on it for the key source of traffic. Changes include outgrowing the site, it started with 400 extensions and they did not foresee the high amount of extensions in the future. Which meant having to improve and update the site to create a new extension to manage the website.
This change will automate a lot of the processes making a more streamlined system. Instead of manually approving a submission, this will allow the extension to be checked by the system and the developer will be notified of the results. It will indicate if it passes the checks to be uploaded onto the JED or if it is flagged and needs altering.
With the change in Joomla! 3.2 with the web installer, how does that affect the Joomla Extension Directory? In the new build, they have added a lot of new API requirements. Developers can Host XML file on their websites and then can update their listings.
We will see a new review and voting system implemented, which means getting rid of the star rating system to try something new and different. This combines the reporting and ticket system into one central system which should improve workflow. The goal is to have the least human interaction necessary, by automating as much as possible.
A tip for developers
Read the directions on how to submit a listing. The majority of listings get rejected because of common errors. Go over the checklist, read the rules for submissions.
Thank you to Tessa and Matt for joining us on this episode of the Joomla Beat podcast.
Extra Notes
Let me know in the comments below about your experiences in submitting extensions to the JED and how you go about making money from creating and selling extensions.
I have slowing been testing Niche Extensions over the past few months, I built Niche Extensions with Akeeba Subscriptions, which is made by the team at Akeeba Backup. I chose this extension to sell my own extensions as it allows for multiple different subscriptions streams. This allows users to have access for a period of time rather than a one off sale. Personally I like the period of time subscriptions, so I can come back to the site if I need too as I use the extension.
The only downside to Akeeba Subscriptions is the fact that they have stopped support for it, but you can find the code on GitHub, so if anyone else wants to pick it up and support it they can.
I also use it to provide training sessions. Check out JoomTraining to find the upcoming T3 training sessions if you are interested.
Stayed tuned for episode 50 on Saturday!
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