2010, A Look Back and 2011, A Look Forward

Roughly about six months back, we took an initiative to move towards product specialisation from outsourcing and customisations. This is a quick look at what has happened in the past year and what we are looking forward in 2011.

Last year was an important year for us at Kulendra.Net. After working on providing customisation services for Joomla and Wordpress based platforms for nearly four years, we decided to take up our long term ambition of providing pre-built extensions for Joomla and Wordpress. Although the concept of moving towards a product based company sounded great, there were too many unknowns. For one, we did not know whether we had a product that could sell. But the popularity of our very first product VMBanner, a banner management extension for Virtuemart that allows you to target the banners based on the product category being viewed, gave us some confidence. We obviously thought that that was the best place to start off.

The very first product we released was kBanners4VM, an improved version of VMBanner. Yes we know, it is not the most imaginative name, but it was there for a reason. Firstly we wanted to have some sort of an indication that this was a product by Kulendra.Net. Secondly, half way through development of the product, we figured that we were onto something, this was not something just for Virtuemart, this was something you could apply for the entire Joomla universe, including the core Joomla system it self. There was space for much more banner extensions.

And that is when we decided to build our second extension, kBanners4Joomla. Building on the same framework as kBanners4VM, we decided to give the flexibility for the users to target their banners based on any query option in the URL being viewed. Regardless of whether you use non-SEF, plain Joomla URLs or whether you use the core SEF conversions or whether you use a 3DP SEF extension, kBanners4Joomla allows you to target banners to your clients based on what exactly they are viewing. And well, that is when we realised we are onto something else as well.

While developing kBanners4Joomla we realised that banners are not the only thing site admins want directed based on what you view. Taking a sidestep from the usual banner management extensions, we decided to build Modules2Pages, a module that allows you to load other modules based on what you are viewing. Useful? Well we thought so and well we were proven right. Ability to configure the modules based on query options of the URLs allows users to take the module assignment a step further than what Joomla allows by default and Modules2Pages became one of the most popular extensions at Kulendra.Net. Although we initially thought that only developers and integrators would make use of Modules2Pages, we found that users who were maintaining their own sites were making use of Modules2Pages. We are quite happy that it was flexible and straightforward enough for anyone to use.

Once the three extensions were stable, we decided to act on one of the suggestions that were put forward by a visitor to our site. Build a banner management extension for RedShop. RedShop is an shopping cart extension for Joomla that does pretty much everything Virtuemart does. Although RedShop is relatively new to the block, we sensed and beleived in the potential it had. Soon enough we had released kBanners4redShop, the banner management extension for redShop that allows admins to direct banners based on redShop categories being viewed. (Many thanks to Sean for introducing us to RedShop!)

Our first extension on Wordpress was wp-eXtplorer; a port of the popular file management and ftp extension eXtplorer to Wordpress. In our outsourcing and site building days we realised that eXtplorer was a great tool. It allowed us to do pretty much everything we could do on an FTP connection and much more. And when we were working on Wordpress, we immediately realised the loss of not having something similar. Yes there were some FTP extensions, but nothing was comparable to eXtplorer.

Instead of building a whole new extension from scratch, we recognised eXtplorer for the gem it was and decided to cut it differently. The eXtplorer port to Wordpress as wp-eXtplorer came out after few weeks of work after we managed to lock in the security aspects of the extension and allowing it to be used by admin users of Wordpress. And well, that is when we decided to give it away for free.

So yeah, that's how it has been the in 2010. Frankly we are quite happy that within six months of starting, we managed to spin off five extensions and make them stable. Our popularity has been growing and our customers are happy. Some of them have suggested some additional that we can provide and we are seriously considering a few of those. And that's where 2011 begins for us.

We realised that some of the extensions we build can be easily extended to provide a wider range of functionalities. For example, in addition to using URL query options in kBanners4Joomla and Modules2Pages, how about having the ability to use specific information of the user who is viewing the page to direct ads to him? Would you like to display a different module or a banner to the user if he's logged in? Do you have different offers to visitors from Asia and Europe? Have some offers for the city of the visitor? Well, that is one of the main items in our roadmap for this year, and you wouldn't have to wait for a long time. We plan to release an extension plugin for Joomla which will allow you to access information such as user's status, browser capabilities, location etc. And the best part, you would be able to use it outside the products of Kulendra.Net. Yes we are going to make that information accessible for any 3DP developer so you don't have to build code from scratch!

That's not the only thing, we believe that the reason for the popularity of kBanners extensions is their configurability. And we fully plan to develop a few more kBanners products aimed at various existing extensions on Joomla. Well we can't tell you what exactly they are, but just wait and see ;)

We haven't left Wordpress alone. One of our observations for Wordpress was the lack of support it has towards making it a fully functional CMS. Yes, it used to be a blogging platform for a while but now Wordpress is gaining popularity as a CMS due to it's user friendliness and flexiblity. But as developers we do come across the lack of options when building sites for our clients, prompting us to code pages from scratch. One of our goals for 2011 is to port some of our extensions on Joomla to Wordpress. Yes you guessed it right, kBanners4WP and Widgets2Pages would come out very soon :)

So yeah, that's the plan for the next year for us. We do hope that our plans would be successful and that our customers would be as happy as ever. Hope you will have a great year ahead as well!