Nooku Framework extension wins Joomla Developers’ Showdown
Last month Brian Teeman (Joomla co-founder) ran an unofficial Joomla Developers Showdown. The premise was to create a fully functional and documented extension in four days. The extension had to meet some basic requirements based around a concept of a company directory.
Beer without the headaches
Being a competitive bunch we couldn’t resist and so Team Nooku was formed to complete the challenge and the humourosly named B.E.E.R was born — short for Business Enterprise Employee Repository. The task was to develop a component to satisfy the needs of “Impossible Missions Force“:
IMF employ 200 people in five 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.
Have a look at the resulting alpha version, powered by BEER and the underlying Nooku Framework.
Current features include:
- People, Departments, Offices
- Template Overrides support
- Gravatar support
- VCard support
- Plugin support
- Search engine friendly URL’s
- Single installer
- Search plugin
Rapid Application Development
By creating a winning alpha version of B.E.E.R., team Nooku has been able to demonstrate Nooku Framework’s rapid development capability. “Someone in the Nooku community said the framework was ‘An alien life form that makes Joomla smarter’. It certainly is setting new benchmarks with every iteration we release,” Mathias Verraes said.
“Over the past few months we have been holding Nooku Code Jams where Joomla developers can learn how to leverage the Nooku Framework. We also started doing in-house training sessions for companies looking to build more flexible Joomla extensions.”
“We think the groundswell of developer interest will eventually manifest into a very powerful movement that is nothing but positive for the Joomla community overall. More power, more flexibility, more reusability. It’s the next generation MVC that Joomla was craving for,” Mathias said.
“If you’re a developer and you want a competitive edge with your component development, Nooku Framework is a must.”
Free Beer
Team Nooku will be releasing B.E.E.R. for free under the GPL license soon. In the meantime you can have a look at the manual, which includes screenshots of the backend user interface.
You can read Brian Teeman’s complete breakdown of this competition on his blog. You can read more about the Nooku Framework or, if you’re ready to take the dive into this fabulous framework, apply for access to the code and other resources.