Joomla Beefs Brewing

It looks like there’s a showdown brewing in the “AJAX-Joomla” subculture lately, with both JoomlaWorks.gr and Gavick.com releasing fading content scroller extensions in close proximity to each other.

Rundown after the jump.

First off, one’s commercial, and one’s not.

Each can be made visually attractive via CSS.

And that’s it. The features and functionality are quite similar. Short review, eh? The technical details and fundamental differences of these extensions, while mired in the buzzword bogs associated with AJAX for web geeks, are from a user’s perspective quite opaque.

I can’t help but wonder if the close proximity of these releases indicates some deeper beef brewing between 3PD’s of a more open-source orientation, and those that are commercially-oriented.

I also rather wonder if an Eastern Hemisphere-Western Hemisphere Joomla Component War isn’t brewing. Imagine the OG fun: Thugged-out Joomla partisans with rival color schemes making intercontinental hits on one another while turning out increasingly blinged-out, jazzy components. And when my Wrapper content is rolling on dubs with spinner-rims, it will have officially gone too far.

One of these musings is serious, and one is a joke, of course, but it’s good entertainment either way. And it’s also healthy for the community: There is a solution out there for the people, and one for people with slightly more refined needs and tastes, and with a bigger wallet to match.

Note also that Gavick positions its extensions as a loss-leader to further its templates business, which I can definitely tell you from client conversations is an emergent market.

Commercial 3PD’s need to remain mindful of a few key things:

• The opportunity costs incurred by pricing their work out of sync with supply and demand, there’s no reason that both the commercial and open-source communities can’t co-exist peacefully under the Joomla banner.
• Currency Exchange. Commercial 3PD’s should also consider the currency exchange rates to the most lucrative prospective countries for sales efforts.
• Quality Control. If you’re trying to sell a component, it needs to be vastly superior than the best open-source, GPL solution to earn out its development costs. Better l10n thinking on the part of commercial 3PD’s would be welcome, as well.

In short, the free-vs-commercial “battle” within the Joomlasphere will be won with ideas.

Editor’s Notes:

Firstly, I initially previewed an early version of the Gavick.com scroller. It appears to have improved substantially in a subsequent version. Therefore, it’s clearly the more compelling solution, and reinforces the notion, however humorous, of this being a targetted open-source “hit” on a commercial 3PD.

As to the Gangster-rap theme of this post, I inadvertently found myself immersed in Wikipedia’s lengthy articles on hip-hop culture recently, and some of the nomenclature appears to have set in for a few days. Please bear with me, yo. Rest assured that I fully intend to check myself befo’ I wreck myself. The book will be at least Certified 99% rap-language free.