Joomla in Faces. Roland Dalmulder (developer)

Roland Dalmulder, a dedicated developer from the Netherlands, has deeply shaped the Joomla ecosystem. A former Bug Squad Leader and organizer of the Joomla User Group Rotterdam, his commitment is unwavering. Now focused on building new features for Joomla and Single Sign-On, he remains a key architect of the platform's future.

My name is Roland Dalmulder and I am the founder of rolandd.com which is primarily known for RO CSVI. Since the inception of Joomla I have been around the community in various roles of either leadership or support. Lately I am more in the background and maintain the Identity Portal and the Patch Tester. If I am not coding, I am running. Not running away from my code but to clear my head 😛

The journey began with building a webshop, VirtueMart at the time, and I have never left. As I was in an open source community before Joomla I already had some experience with writing patches, testing etc. so that did help to get me started quite quickly within the Joomla community.

Yes, I also work with Craft CMS. As one of my customers uses that a lot to build customer websites.

The focus on eCommerce solutions was there definitely in the past because most Joomla users were using Joomla with VirtueMart. I would say that over the past decade this has changed a lot. There are plenty of other eCommerce solutions besides VirtueMart but also I have changed. In the past I always said that RO CSVI is not a migration tool, which it still is not, but we do recognize the fact that you can actually migrate data with RO CSVI as long as you understand it is not a one button experience.

Therefore we provide migration templates for the Joomla core as well. This has helped users to move from old Joomla sites to new Joomla sites with just their content and let them start with a fresh base.

Our other extension that has been around for a long time is RO Payments, this let's you integrate payment options within your website. By the use of profiles, you can connect multiple providers or one provider with different options to a number of different extensions. In the early days this was focused on the Dutch market but we now also offer international payment providers making it interesting for many more Joomla users.

Since a few years we added RO Single Sign On to our portfolio to allow single sign on solutions to work with Joomla as well. You can turn your Joomla site into an Identity Provider or use your Joomla site with another Identity Provider. This is often the case in larger environments where user accounts are managed in a central location. The Joomla Identity Portal has been running RO Single Sign On for quite a few years now as well, that is what got this extension started in the first place.

Migrations often lead to questions because you need to have a good understanding of what you want to migrate. That is the biggest pitfall for users, they know Joomla but they have little understanding of the underlying database structure. This is not something they would deal with very often, or at least they should not. Doing direct database imports has it's dangers. That is why we always recommended to test your migrations first before you go ahead and run them on a live environment. In general I think users get by quite well.

We do offer custom work for users who rather have the migration done by specialists. We live and breath the Joomla database, so it is much easier for us to do than it is for the user who does it once every couple of years. The same goes for any job you need to do I guess. The specialist has the knowledge, experience and tools for the job while when you do it yourself you are lacking in all three areas. You still may be able to do it but it will take longer. On the other hand, there is the satisfaction that you did so and you gained knowledge while doing it.

Migrating orders is one of those things that is quite complex because it has so many dependencies. That is a real challenge.

I do not think that cloud platforms have lowered the barrier entry into technology, this was done decades ago when we got the graphical user interface. Users would just need to point and click and they can get things done. What global marketplaces and cloud platforms have done is that they brought running your website to a broader audience. However there are still technicalities that users can trip over, for example how to configure their DNS server or get a domain name that belongs to them and not to the hosting company. There is also the issue of vendor lock-in in regards to your data. How portable is the data that you create and store on the hosted website of the cloud platform and/or the global marketplace. In case you want to move, can you easily export that data and load into your new location. Those are challenges users do not think about until it is too late. The result being that you may need to redo everything from scratch.

The market is definitely more challenging simply because technology evolved and users do not have 1,2,3 options for creating an eCommerce website but they have 100,200,300 options. This doesn't make it easier for users or developers. In the end it is not about who has the better product anymore as most of them do a good job, so what you need to focus on is customer support and product development. Showing that you invest time in keeping the product up-to-date and modern while providing first class customer service is what will sway customers to choose you as a developer. Word of mouth is more important than ever. I have hear enough stories of developers ghosting customers for whatever reason that may be. That is not something anybody wants. There is a market for custom development and there always will be, you just have to proof you are professional enough to do the job.

The most memorable story for me is the one that came by when I first started charging for my extension. In the early days of RO CSVI (CSV Improved at the time) I was offering the extension for free as I had a full time job and coding was really just a hobby. As time passed the extension become more and more popular and this was asking more and more of my free time. This reached the point where I was getting home from my day job and the rest of the night was doing support and development of RO CSVI. The hobby part had gone out of the window. That is when I decided I should charge a fee for my extension. So I did, 20 euros for a one-year subscription. Just to make it worth my time as well and keep me motivated to work on it.

This now required payment to be able to download RO CSVI led one user to comment on the VirtueMart forum that I should not charge for RO CSVI because Joomla is free, VirtueMart is free and so my extension should be free as well. My reply was simple, Joomla is free, VirtueMart is free, I will make my extension free and I can shop for free in your webshop. I never received a reply 😂

More teams than I can remember probably. The overall experience is good, people are willing to help, willing to move Joomla forward, willing to share their knowledge and there is a lot of expertise. This was 20 years ago but still rings true till today. As with every community, there are challenges as well. They were there in the old days, they are here today.

All we can ask for is that community members keep an open mind. We will never all agree but at least we can agree that we disagree on certain subjects.

The motivation doesn't necessarily come from Joomla but rather from my desire to build. I like to build solutions, Joomla is a great solution. So I enjoy building on that. I do enjoy seeing so many Joomla users using a little piece of code I added to Joomla. Having said that, I am burned out that it is so hard to get any code changes approved and merged into the core. That is also the reason I am barely contributing to the core of Joomla nowadays. Instead I work on the Joomla Patch Tester and the Identity Portal.

Since I do not build websites I can't really comment on how it is as a site integrator but as a developer I do believe that the CMS and Framework are mature platforms to build on. Since I have primarily focused on Joomla, I know my way around the code very well. At the same time that also makes it enjoyable for me as I know where to find code when I need it.

I do not have a clear picture of what is in place now but I think the one thing that could make our lives easier is more automation. Primarily automated testing, for example the unit testing and static analysis. A lot of great work has already been done in that space but we could use more of it. Perhaps even documentation on how to write such automations for Joomla.

What a time it has been. We cannot compare how Joomla is running nowadays to 20 years ago but a new generation is being formed I think.

The people who are coming in now will have a completely different experience the next 20 years as we had the past 20 years. My hope is that we can keep Joomla relevant for another 20 years.