Joomla in Faces. Sakis Terzis (developer)

Sakis Terzis began his development journey in 2006 and created his first Joomla extension in 2008. Since then, he has developed several popular extensions for Joomla, many of which have been widely used by the community for years. He is best known as the author of the JFilters extension.

We felt this was the perfect time to connect with a seasoned developer, so we sat down with Sakis Terzis to discuss this new chapter. Enjoy the interview!

I was born and raised outside Thessaloniki Greece. Beyond walking with my dog, I take great pleasure from creating things, most often using wood or code. I also love learning about history and listening to music.

It was back in 2006, in one of my first jobs as a web developer. Until then, I had built a few websites for friends and acquaintances, where everything was custom-coded. Then I suddenly discovered that the majority of the work I was doing was already available via something called a “CMS,” and Joomla was one of the hottest names. I jumped in and haven't left since.

No.

Currently my main (but I should admit “small”) contribution comes from reporting and testing bugs. In the past, I also contributed code and some features in the Joomla core.

In most cases, it is either about solving an issue that we faced or about improving a functionality of the CMS. So, usually it is about solving a problem that me or someone else encounters.

Jfilters is now the de facto filtering extension for Joomla. Also its development is very active. I was lucky enough that some very active and prominent members of the Joomla community embraced it, from the beginning. That gave me valuable feedback but also some visibility, that much needed.

I am always exploring what could be missing and looking for new opportunities but currently I have nothing new in my plans.

In Greece, Joomla has a quite substantial market share exceeding 5% (source: builtwith.com), which is much higher than the global average. In the past, I was fortunate enough to attend Joomla days with hundreds of passionate people. But in the last years things seem a bit quiet.

Woocommerce is by far the biggest player.

Joomla is a complete, secure, modern, and easily extensible CMS, ideal for small to medium organizations. The core has all the essential features (ACL, multi-lingual, custom fields, SEO features) for building modern and fast websites, without relying on questionable 3rd party extensions and without spending a fortune.

First, we must acknowledge that the progress made from Joomla 4 onward is significant. The Joomla code is now modern, which makes a developer's life much easier. Moreover, there are great improvements in its APIs, UI and its performance.

The trend seems to be toward headless CMSs, where APIs play a big role. I would like to see the Joomla webservices extended further and also consider implementing GraphQL, which seems to be more efficient for fetching a lot of data. From a marketing perspective, I'd also love to see Joomla increase its reach to a wider audience. I think the product deserves a much bigger market share.