Meet NorrNext. Eugene Sivokon (product/project manager)

Joomla’s 20th Birthday is a time to celebrate and reflect on the past two decades. Sergey Tolkachyov initiated a series of interviews with prominent members of the Russian Joomla community for Joomlaportal.ru, including a conversation with Eugene Sivokon. We are sharing an English version of this interview to help you get to know the NorrNext team better. Let's begin.

Hello everyone, my name is Eugene Sivokon. I work in full-cycle website development and e-commerce solutions. Over time, I’ve taken on many different roles — product and team manager, QA, designer, and content manager. I am also into strategic management and marketing.
But at the core, I simply love creating. For me, it always starts with a small sketch on paper — an idea that gradually takes shape, like clay turning into something meaningful in the hands of a sculptor.

“In the beginning was the Word...”. Every project begins with an idea that needs validation. First, I analyze the niche, look at what’s already available on the market, and study the community’s experience. Once I gather enough insights, I create a technical specification, and from that moment the real journey starts — development and teamwork.
We use the Scandinavian style of negotiations, where every participant shares their opinion during discussions, which allows us to look at the situation from multiple perspectives. Or, as a Russian proverb says, “Two heads are better than one.”

When a product reaches beta, we test it, refine it, and prepare it for release. But that’s not all. It’s also about building infrastructure, aligning the product with standards, writing documentation, preparing announcements on social media, and connecting with the external world.
I don’t code myself, but I’m deeply involved in all these steps — guiding the product from the first spark of an idea to its launch, like launching the ship into the water.

This is how products are born. And every time, it brings the same joy — the feeling of being not just a creator, but a co-author. Teamwork is a different level of interaction, perception, and responsibility.

Today, I also run a web design studio, where we develop websites and online stores based on the technology stack of the Russian Joomla community.

In 2007, I discovered the world of the Joomla CMS and joined the joomlaforum.ru, which was one of the two key community hubs. It was a full-fledged platform where users could ask questions, share experiences, and gain knowledge. At that time, the system’s capabilities were impressive: speed, flexibility, and extensibility. Since then, Joomla has firmly become a part of my life and remains my primary work tool to this day.

I am the co-founder of CMScafe (formerly joomlablog.ru) — a resource that my colleagues and I launched in 2010. We published news, translated interesting articles into Russian, and developed the site (I personally prepared several hundred articles). As a result, CMScafe accumulated a wealth of valuable information about Joomla for webmasters and developers and gained recognition within the Russian Joomla community. Today, the resource serves as a reference hub.

Later, my international involvement began. Since 2014, I contributed to RoundTheme — a template club for third-party Joomla extensions. It was an experimental project aimed at improving the design of popular components. During its existence, templates were released for Kunena, JComments, AcyMailing, and several functional applications for ZOO CCK. Thanks to RoundTheme, I gained valuable experience in product packaging, release, and project management.

The experience obtained from RoundTheme was scaled up and applied to the NorrNext project. This is a Joomla extensions club that has released several niche products with no analogues. Currently, the main focus is on e-commerce — we develop plugins for popular Joomla stores and grow the e-com segment. My role is product manager, and I am also involved in product promotion and marketing.

My modest contribution to the international community was noticed ¹, and in 2015 the Open Source Matters, Inc. supported my attendance at J and Beyond (Prague, Czech Republic) as a visitor. I also take part at various events as a speaker. For example, I participated in JoomlaDay Poland 2015, JoomlaDay Germany 2015, and twice in Russia (see JoomlaDay 2014 report and Joomla 2017 report).

In addition, I contribute to extensions for VirtueMart and Phoca Cart. And of course, in addition to all this, I create websites. All of them — on Joomla.

Oh, and one more thing — I also run a Joomla Telegram channel in English @Joomlahub (500+ subscribers), where I publish up-to-date Joomla news, event and beta release announcements, as well as links to developer articles, tutorials, and extension announcements.

I enjoy my work and earn a living by creating websites with Joomla. This is one of those cases where work and hobby go hand in hand, giving you both aesthetic satisfaction from self-realization and professional growth. Joomla, in this case, turned out to be a perfect fit — a convenient platform for building products and, I emphasize, an optimal platform for website development. This is especially important for the end user — the site owner — because a website built on a stack developed by a professional community and on a platform where security is a top priority for CMS developers is a guarantee of business stability, especially online. So why switch platforms if this one works so well?

Flexibility in development, security, SEO friendliness, a convenient templating system, built-in fields, and support for the latest software versions (MySQL, PHP). A well-written foundation, combined with the Russian community’s technology stack, provides powerful tools for building modern websites and serves as a point of growth.

20 years is a serious milestone for any technology, and Joomla, like a child who has crossed the threshold of adulthood, has become mature.
The most challenging period for Joomla was between 2015 and 2017, caused by many side factors such as cloud website builders, the growth of social networks (cloud services and social media took away part of the audience), marketing mistakes, and stagnation in essential technologies. Add to this the rapid spread of so-called “common buy” (platforms where participants pooled money to buy extensions) and warez resources, market dumping, and poor awareness of web ethics among site owners (the need for maintenance and ongoing development). All of this led to a decline in users. Similar problems were faced by other communities too. We managed to overcome this stage with difficulty and stay afloat. Since then, Joomla has become even more flexible. And with the release of Joomla 5, new features have been added that make the platform especially appealing for SEO.

Of course, nothing is perfect. Since the system is created by a community of people who contribute and create, the features Joomla has “under the hood” or within third-party products today are the result of meticulous work by individuals building their reputation step by step. Currently, Joomla is very developer-friendly, but few outside the professional community know this. Now we have significant work ahead to popularize the platform, attract new people (“new blood”), and bring back those who previously had experience with Joomla. That’s exactly what we plan to do, and I invite all readers to take part and join the active ranks of the community.

Joomla is not just a hobby, but an effective tool for earning a living. The better and more flexible this tool becomes, the more efficient the final result we can achieve. Those who join the process will strengthen their personal brand and turn it into success. Become part of the friendly Joomla community.