Well I've spent, together with the other judges, the last few weeks evaluating the entries for the "Joomla Developers Showdown".

(Apologies for the delay in releasing this information - other things just got in the way)

It's certainly been interesting and we're very impressed with the quality of entries

We will be running this showdown again later in the year and I've learnt a few things that will hopefuly make it bigger and better.

• Don't run a competition over 4th July as you knock out all the Americans
• Don't assume that developers will be creative
• Don't assume that everyone who says they will take part will actually submit an entry

As a reminder the task was to develop a component to satisfy the needs of "Impossible Missions Force ".

IMF employ 200 people in 5 departments spread across 10 offices around the world. They require a directory of all employees for their new corporate web site. At a minimum each employee record should include a photograph, contact details, job title and a contact form. IMF hope that you will be able to provide multiple methods to navigate the directory including by name, location, department.

After much debate we reduced the entries to a shortlist of two.

• Business Enterprise Employee Repository (B.E.E.R) by a team from within Nooku Framework's user community.
• EasyCompany by a team from easy-joomla.org

Both of these extensions satisfied all the set criteria but took very different approaches. It should be noted that both of these teams stated in their submissions that the work was Alpha quality due to lack of time. Although both have some small bugs we believed that these were minor and due to time restraints and that they could be quickly resolved.

Documentation & Sample data

Both EasyCompany and BEER supplied sample data but only the nooku team provided a user manual and boy what in depth documentation, over 10 pages. How I wish that all Joomla extension developers did that.
+1 BEER

Support for mulitple languages

EasyCompany used the standard joomla ini files for language strings and was provided with both English and German languages. Whilst BEER had the potential to be available in multiple languages as it used JTEXT a separate language file was not provided so it would be a little harder to create translation files. You would need to use a tool to gather all the strings to translate.
+1 EasyCompany

MVC architecture allowing template overrides

Both extensions were fully MVC which was great to see. BEER provided far more views than EasyCompany as the component provided more complexity and options.
+1 BEER

Admin Interface

EasyCompany allowed you to upload a profile photo for the employee but BEER grabbed its photo's from the gravatar service. Both options have there merits but I think I prefer the ability to upload my own photos for a company directory.
+1 EasyCompany

EasyCompany provided a base level of profile information but BEER went a lot further including options for a bio and gender.
+1 BEER

BEER also allowed for more information in the Office and Department details. With BEER an office could have telephone and fax details (perhaps for a central switchboard) which you could not do with EasyCompany. I also liked the pre-filled country and state data supplied with BEER.
+1 BEER

Front End Interface

The interface to EasyCompany is basically a slightly modified version of the standard joomla contacts component with all lists being created from drop down select boxes and filters.

BEER was more advanced and benefited from sortable columns and clickable data in the list views. eg click on Tom's department to see a list of all co-workers in that department. As previously mentioned it was also possible to see more details of an office or department.
+1 BEER

Code and Code documentation

I asked for documentation in the code itself and EasyCompany definitely had more of that.
+1 EasyCompany

But it should be noted that EasyCompany used the standard Joomla API but BEER used the Nooku Framework. As a result the code in BEER was naturally easier to read anyway so perhaps didn't need the documentation.
+1 BEER

Usability

Perhaps the greatest difference between these two entries was that the Nooku team provided extra functionality that, whilst not directly specified, greatly enhanced the usability of the extension. In general users found BEER more intuitive to use so as that is perhaps the main criteria with any joomla extension
+1 BEER

Final Score

EasyCompany 3

BEER 7

Congratulations to our Winner the "Nooku Community Team" you can see it in action at http://showdown.nooku.org

The "Nooku Community Team" have informed me that they will be making BEER available for download shortly"

I regularly suffer from migraines. I've tried many things from removing certain food groups from my diet (sugary sweets) but at the end of the day I think it's mainly down to dehydration.

Coffee doesn't hydrate you, not sure why that is as it's mainly water, but it doesn't.

So now I am drinking large quantities of bottled water as I build each new Joomla web site - too early to say if the migraines have gone but my skating has improved and so has my sense of rhythm.

Red Bull might "give you wings" but Evian "gives you wheels".

Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site

After yesterday's blog post this is a great example of creating content that people will want to share.

So I have a blog, a twitter account, a facebook page, posted videos to youtube and vimeo and numerous other "social media" accounts but why?

I famously told one client that Web 2.0 is a "crock of sh*t" and a "waste of time (for them)" and for that client I was proven correct.

But is it really?

Should I be taking more notice of Social Media?

Does it matter?

After watching this presentation perhaps I should be taking more notice of Social Media and the impact they can have.

If watching that presentation hurt your brain, was just too technical or you want to know more... try this video. 

Social Media in Plain English

Has social media had a positive, or even negative, impact for you. What tools have you found to be more sucessful?

Sorry having a shitty week normal blogging service will be resumed shortly.