Brian says.... or what did we learn from Mr. Teeman – one of the Joomla founders

Only few days after we moved to the new office we were happy to welcome our first very special guest: Brian Teeman. He is one of the Joomla founders and an amazingly interesting person to listen and talk to. He spent two days with the SiteGround team sharing with us his love for Joomla, his viewpoint what a good customer service is and his great sense of humor. It is just impossible to tell you everything we learned from him during the multiple sessions he held for our team in a single blog post, but I just need to share few of the things my fellow SiteGrounders pointed out as memorable:

How was Joomla founded – a Fork or a Spoon?

According to Brian Teeman this is the story: “People would usually use the term FORK for what happened when Joomla people moved away from the Mambo project… however, in our case I do not think it was a FORK, I would rather call it a SPOON, as there were not two separate projects that continue to develop independently, Mambo just disappeared and Joomla is what we still have…”

What will help you use Joomla easily? CASH???

Surprisingly for an application built on the open source free usage philosophy, it turned out that CASH will help you use Joomla easily… but this is a special CASH – an abbreviation invented by Mr. Teeman to make the beginning users remember easily what are the right steps for publishing with Joomla:

1. Define your Categories
2. Write your Articles
3. SHow them to the audience by publishing them

What will be the best thing in Joomla 3?

We had the privilege to catch a better glimpse of the things to come in Joomla 3 whose stable version is expected to be released in September. The Admin interface will be much more user-friendly and compatible with the mobile devices thanks to the Bootstrap technology.

Why should a good supporter never assume?

A great rule of thumb Mr. Teeman pointed out, and I cannot agree more with, is: “Do not assume, because this makes an ass out of u and me”

What is important for a good Joomla extension?

Obviously, it is not the complexity of its code, but its usefulness and its clear purpose or as Brian Teeman puts it and our developers already love to quote: “never make the developers do something just because they can…”

Now that the event is over, everyone in SiteGround perceives Joomla more personally than ever. As Ivan A., one of our Customer service people, wrote to me: “Joomla is like a human being. It started off just like an infant – created by the love of people in their search for purpose, evolved through its rebellious teenage years when it separated from Mambo and right now is in the prime of its life – eager and willing to try new things out, to create memories and build relationships. Striving to constantly evolve and show the world that it is there. Searching for the acknowledgment and recognition for everything it has achieved.” Thank you Brian once again for helping us understand Joomla better. We are now ready to share on our turn the love we have for this great software in our day-to-day work with our customers who use it!

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager