Nooku Developer Portal opens doors

In the past 5 years, I have pursued my vision to champion a diverse, open, multi-lingual and multi-cultural web, with Joomla at the heart. Two years ago, when Mathias joined me, we came at a crossroad. The only way was forward. With the help of our partners and now also with our growing community of developers, we built Nooku.

It’s has been an incredible exciting and rewarding experience. We’ve listened, we’ve coded, and we’ve grown. Joomla 1.5′s main goal was  to make a more extensible and modular framework. With Nooku we are taking Joomla to a next level, adding real architecture, and rapid development power. We believe our Nooku Framework can further inspire collaboration among developers, integrators and end-users.

That’s why I’m very excited to announce today our new Nooku Developer Portal.

A place to collaborate

The Nooku Developer Portal contains all the resources needed to learn and use the Nooku Framework. There’s the code of course, but also a plethora of other tasty bits for developers :

1. The Nooku Framework space holds the actual framework code and this is where most of the work is done. You can browse the wiki to learn more and get started.
2. The Nooku Components space hosts our official reusable components. At the moment we are working on com_profiles, a user profile component and com_terms, a taxonomy component.
3. The Nooku Examples space hosts our example components, code snippets and other code that helps you understand how to build Nooku-based extensions
4. The Nooku Tools space hosts scripts and tools that can help you increase your productivity when developing with Nooku Framework.

Today we are also opening up our mailing list to be publicly readable. If you want to join the discussion, we still ask you to fill in the request access form. It’s only a couple of minutes of your time, but it helps us to learn a little bit about you.

The API that speaks for itself

Nooku is central to the development of the promising Anahita Social Engine and Ninjaboard, and many more are being built right now. We’ve gotten some great feedback: developers told us Nooku Framework helps them save time, and allows to build in more power and flexibility, while at the same time reducing the number of bugs.

Ninjaboards’s "Joomla Framework vs Nooku Framework comparison" illustrates why developers love the re-usability of Nooku Framework. Less time writing code yet delivering more power.

The missing pieces of Joomla!

The Nooku Developer Portal is a realisation of two years of work to produce the framework I had always intended Joomla would become. We have always maintained a focus on re-usable code, true MVC architecture, as well as introducing design patterns that would be familiar to most software engineers. As Rastin (Anahita developer) said: "Nooku is an alien lifeform that lives in Joomla and makes it better!"  

We are not there yet. We still have quite some road to travel. Our next step will be the release of Nooku Framework 0.7 beta, coming soon. The API will be frozen, and all focus will go to stabilization, making Nooku the best choice for your next project. You can track our progress here. If you want to help out, sign up and join us in making good things happen.

See you in the Nookusphere!

Johan Janssens