If you're a Joomla user, you've probably already heard of JEvents, YourSites or EasyLayouts. But do you know the man behind these essential extensions?

A passionate developer and major player in the Joomla ecosystem, Geraint Edwards is behind powerful, flexible solutions that make it easier to manage events, administer client sites and create advanced Joomla page layouts.
In this interview, he looks back on his career, his early days with Joomla, the challenges he has faced to make a living with it and his vision of extension development. He also shares his commitment to the Joomla community and gives us some perspectives on the future of his tools. Let's dive into the world of Geraint Edwards and discover behind the scenes of his iconic extensions!

Hello Geraint,
Joomla users are familiar with your extensions, but don't really know much about you. Can you give us a quick introduction?

There are 3 main extensions:

• JEvents and its addons.  
  A free event calendar and management system for Joomla - with a long list of commercial addons adding 
  • Venue and resource/people management,
  • Event booking/ticketing, invitations and reminders,
  • Customisable layouts,
  • Custom fields etc.
• YourSites. 
  A client site management system which runs as a Joomla component on your own private server.
  • Monitor and update client sites
  • Trigger and manage backups
  • Manage client site extensions
• EasyLayouts.
  this extension create beautifully formatted and sophisticated layouts for your Joomla sites using a simple drag and drop interface.  
  Template overrides with no coding in site!

What was your first encounter with Joomla?

A few months before the split with Mambo I was working on a website for my young daughter’s school.  It needed to be easy to use, bilingual and have a decent events calendar.  This led me to Mambo and very quickly to Joomla and to being involved in what would soon become JoomFish and JEvents.  

When did you start developing? At the same period before or later?

Joomfish was quite constrained in functionality for example it could only translate single table queries - so I started working on solutions and working with Alex Kempkens to greatly extend its functionality.  I added support for multi-table queries and fall back languages etc. and worked with Alex for several years developing, enhancing and supporting Joomfish.

MosEvents had been abandoned so, again, since the functionality was limited I took on the project that would become JEvents.

What led you to create your Joomla extension in particular?

My own and my client’s needs were the main drivers.  If I see a need or a problem, my tendency is to develop something to fill the gap myself rather than depending on others to do this for me.  For example Joomfish couldn’t translate JEvents so I got involved with Joomfish and wrote the code to allow this to happen.

Did you start earning a living quickly or was it complicated? What challenges did you face? 

Making money proved difficult to start - my open source work didn’t lead to leads for paid work as I’d hoped.  

Just as I was about to give up, one user needed significantly enhanced functionality in JEvents - managed locations/venues and associating people/resources with events. So our Freemium business model was born. I still can’t buy that Porsche I wanted as a teenager but it has paid the bills over the years.

Is this still the case?

I added 2 major extensions to diversify the business in recent years and reduce the dependence on one product. 

EasyLayouts was born out of the need to make it easier to control how Joomla custom fields were displayed but this has since grown to a fully fledged layout editing tool for most of the Joomla core. I recently realised that much of the functionality in EasyLayouts could be implemented in YOOtheme or linked in to YOOtheme. As a result a slew of YOOtheme extensions were released towards the end of last year.

I discovered that many of my users were wasting too much time managing and monitoring their client sites and were reluctant to put control of their client sites on a black box site management service. So YourSites was born.

Are you in contact with other independent developers? How can this kind of collaboration work?

Sometimes I wonder if there is too much competition between independent developers for Joomla.  If there was more cooperation/collaboration we could possibly make more inroads into the web marketplace.  Rather than competing with each other we could be working together to beat the larger fish in larger ponds.

For example, we could be working on shared libraries for payment handling, user messaging, shipping systems, commenting, tax rules, templating/design tools/standards etc. Features that are never going to be part of core but that would make developing powerful commercial addons for Joomla more straightforward and in turn increase the attraction of Joomla as a website framework.

What is the one thing people don't know about your extensions?

That they exist at all ;)

I think most Joomla users will have heard of JEvents but may not realise how flexible and powerful it is.  

However I suspect fewer will know of EasyLayouts and YourSites.  Most people, when they discover what EasyLayouts and YourSites can do, tend to say they wished they’d known about them earlier.

What are the topics people always ask for support?

Whilst our documentation isn’t as comprehensive and as up to date as I’d like, I am of the view that if the same question has been asked more than once then it is a sign that we need a specific support article covering that topic.

Having said this, JEvents and EasyLayouts have a lot of features and it’s not always obvious how to achieve certain outcomes so we tend to spend a fair amount of time answering the question ‘How can I do …. ?’.  As an aside, answering this type of question often leads to us adding new features so it’s a win for everyone!

Do you get a lot out of the Joomla community?

The Joomla community is very important to me - Joomlers are my work colleagues and many are good friends. The hard work so many people put in to developing and supporting Joomla is amazing!

What is your involvement in the Joomla community?

I have submitted many PRs over the years and plan to continue to do so in the future. I’d like to think of JEvents (the core of which is free) as a contribution to the Joomla community as it allows non-commercial websites to add a sophisticated event calendar to their sites thereby extending the reach of Joomla.

What do you think of Joomla's ecosystem?

I am very comfortable with the Joomla architecture and find that almost everything that I want to achieve can be done. The codebase is getting more powerful all the time - though sometimes I think that we could do with a few more plugin triggers in the core code.

How do you see your future with Joomla? Do you have any surprises up your sleeve?

Joomla continues to be at the heart of my business and I continue to actively develop our existing extensions for Joomla. There are always new ideas being forged into new features/products often arising out of specific client needs. I’m currently making good progress on looking at ideas for improving performance on one client’s site that may well lead initially to a new product and down the line to possible core enhancements.

Watch this space!

Anything else you’d like to say to our Joomler friends?

"We need more opportunities/excuses to get together!"

Geraint extension's site :

https://www.jevents.net

https://www.easylayout.net

https://www.yoursites.net