Having been around the JoomlaSphere in some capacity or another for years, what keeps me around and coming back are the wonderful and super helpful people that I have encountered over the years... some stay, some go, some comeback and some don't but they are collectively the pillars of the Joomla! project no matter in what way they participate, or contribute...

One such person is Joe Sonne a.k.a. JoeJoomla, a humble gentle soul that is always pleasant and willing to lend a helping hand, not just as part of the JoomlaDay USA team but also in other ways: being a speaker, trainer, writer and more...

Let's learn a bit more about Joe...

What inspired you to get involved with Joomla?

I discovered Joomla when I was helping to digitize the Canadian branch of a large International non profit. This is in the early 90s and I was helping them get their entire business 'online' as well as  improve their enterprise processes… at that time, I was trying a few things, playing around with PHP Nuke and things like that… and I was pointed to Joomla by a web developer when I asked him about "what he would use to build websites today if he had to do it all over again and get results like the nice website he had"… and he pointed me to joomla.org… I created an account with Joe Joomla… and the superman S avatar… I started putting up questions around how to use Joomla on a Mac... there were not a lot of people doing that at the time I guess or I was faster at answering my own questions, and I started replying to/answering my own questions in the forum and pretty soon after, Joe Joomla started becoming popular.

What has stayed the most consistent and changed the most for you in the last almost 20 years of using Joomla?

The thing that originally appealed to me is that you could deploy a Joomla site quickly and it would look great and people were making great templates that gave you variety……  and that has stayed true to this day… and what has changed the most, Joomla’s core capabilities: now you have layout overrides, bootstrap, child-templates, custom fields, tags, and so much more, you can really great things if you want to delve in a bit…. Joomla went from being a very capable hotrod to an exotic racing car these days…

What have you used Joomla for over the years?

I have created many Joomla micro-sites as intranets and was able to help organizations communicate better… in 2009, after years of going to events, I was able to start making a living with Joomla and since then I have worked on many different types of projects from small to enterprise level - as Joomla has really garnered a lot of features in the core over the last couple of major versions (4 and 5), this makes such projects even easier…

What advice would you have for someone coming into or wanting to learn more about Joomla today?

Become as knowledgeable about Joomla as you can on how it works and who makes it work by connecting with the community on Mattermost. A lot of these people are very visible and charitable with sharing their knowledge. If you are passionate about it, you can have deep conversations with the people that actually code Joomla! itself... - that’s the beauty of the Joomla! community, there is flexibility: you can play around with Joomla! as a hobby or spend all of your time making money with developing solutions in and around Joomla!.

What have you seen lately and think about the future of Joomla?

Going to Joomla in-person events is what made the real difference for me... I have participated in every major Joomla World Conference and JBeyond event - "it’s nice to see more events lately coming back such as JoomlaDay USA", which I volunteer for. Meeting people in person, building those relationships makes all of the difference in the world. Connect with the very helpful Mattermost Joomla! community is a piece of advice that Joe repeated several times during our interview.

"I see Joomla! always existing in the future and always being a very capable open source software that lets you do whatever you need to do with it - you just have to learn a bit about it and if you don’t want to learn that’s fine too: you can use something out of the box, you’ll just be restricted to what that extension defines or offers for you… if return on investment is important to you, then going with a very capable tool like Joomla! is the logical way to go, you just need to have the capabilities or the people around you to adapt it to your needs just like I did with quite a few enterprise projects."

“The greatness of Joomla is experienced when you master these two things: Joomla! core and Bootstrap. There is no better open source content management system for building websites than this." thinks Joe Sonne / aka JoeJoomla.

It was a pleasure spending some time with Joe learning more about him, his passion, his path in, through and around tech and Joomla! I wish him many more wonderful years as part of our great community!