Joomla in Faces. Rinat Kazhetov (volunteer)

Greetings to everyone, and thank you to NorrNext for this opportunity. My name is Rinat, and I am from Kazakhstan. I work as a technical specialist in an organization operating in the mass media sector. Previously, I worked in accounting within government institutions.

When I first started using the Internet more actively, I became interested in website development. I tried various CMS platforms: Joomla, WordPress, Drupal — they were the leaders at the time — as well as InstantCMS and others (I no longer remember all of them).

As I experimented with different systems, my interest in some of them faded — the communities were weak, or there were not enough extensions. But Joomla stood out positively. There were also many tutorials from well-known authors (Evgeniy Popov, Vitaly Kulikov, Alexander Kurteev, and others in the Russian-speaking space). Their lessons focused mainly on site administration, and thanks to them, my Joomla journey began.

I have not encountered an active Joomla community in Kazakhstan. Most developers here work with custom-built solutions or frameworks. If there are Joomla enthusiasts, they mainly rely on Russian-speaking communities.

Currently, I am one of the administrators of several Russian-speaking Joomla Telegram channels. When I have time, I try to explore Joomla-related topics, find useful materials and solutions, and share them with the community.

I am personally interested in Joomla and enjoy working with this CMS. From the articles and solutions I share, I also learn a lot for my own projects. I frequently use helpful advice and ideas found in community chats. This always helps in my daily work.

Government websites, major companies, and media outlets typically create multilingual websites — at least in three languages: Kazakh, Russian, and English. Additional languages are added as needed.

Our e-commerce market is well developed. All major players are present, and almost every brand has an online store.

However, fintech ecosystems with their own marketplaces dominate customer habits — most people prefer to shop through them, as they offer credit and installment options directly in their mobile apps.

Kaspi is the market leader — a closed ecosystem that combines a marketplace, a bank, and government services in one application. Halyk Bank and Freedom Bank are also major players; Freedom Bank has been rapidly growing in popularity. Both offer their own super apps and online payment gateways (Epay from Halyk Bank and Freedom Pay).

International marketplaces are also widely used — Chinese platforms, as well as Russian ones like Ozon, Wildberries, and others.

Joomla provides many powerful features out of the box that other CMS platforms lack without additional plugins. In Joomla, many things can be configured through the interface, and layout overrides make customization easy.

For me, the most important improvement would be the ability to configure nested folders in the media manager (the core manager currently uploads everything into the images folder — Quantum Manager helps a lot with this).

I would also appreciate enhancements to the built-in WYSIWYG editor, since we upload images and work with text daily on news websites.

I wish the Joomla community prosperity and longevity. With each release, the developers add new features and improvements to user management. This is what continues to set Joomla apart from many other CMS platforms.