Joomla in Faces. Valentín García (developer)

I'm Valentín García. I was born in San Julián, Jalisco, Mexico, a small town near Guadalajara, in 1987. Since I was 16, I’ve been fascinated by web development, and I worked hard to make a living from designing and coding. I studied University Technician in Computer Technology, and Information Technology Engineering between 2008 and 2012 in León, Guanajuato, México.

I'm interested in Japanese culture, living a balanced life, and using technology for good.

I discovered Joomla in 2010 during a job interview with a guy who built websites with Joomla. I wasn't hired, however that same day I downloaded Joomla for the first time. This was before I started my bachelor's degree. Since then, I've been fascinated by CMSs.

My life overall improved thanks to Joomla, and I wanted to contribute to give something in return to the community, mainly by providing free extensions, templates and writing for the old JED blog.

Thanks to Joomla, I meet great people, and learned through experience how open source can truly change lives.

I currently develop and maintain my Joomla extensions store at htmgarcia.com, where I provide both free and paid products. Recently released a new extended version of Easy Shortcodes, a powerful Joomla extension that lets you supercharge your Joomla site with BBCode-style macros. Useful for handling snippets and content that are usually stripped out by the Joomla editor, such as iframes and JavaScript. Inner Content is another extension that allows you to insert content and HTML into articles — such as banners, ads, Google AdSense, modules, custom scripts, or custom code.

In addition, I develop and maintain Joomla 5 templates on ThemeForest, and I also happen to be the developer behind the MetaSlider WordPress plugin.

I used to write for OSTraining and Joomlashack a few years ago. I learned how to blog at OSTraining using plain English. OSTraining was a great place to improve my expertise in the open source world. This was useful when I was in charge of the JED blog.

I like CSS but I understand some users may not be familiar with the syntax, so a tool to customize the design without coding is something I expect people will find useful.

Tim Davis from Basic Joomla Tutorials was very kind to help me promote the first version of jVisual CSS in his YouTube channel, and I’m grateful for that. That sense of community is what I love about Joomla.

Yes, I’m planning to create new extensions, particularly with an e-commerce and design focus. This includes designing new templates.

There used to be a JUG in Mexico City, however it seems to have been inactive for a few years now.

OXXO is a popular convenience store franchise that is used among users to handle cash-based payments. Mercado Pago is also a very popular Payment Service Provider linked to a major e-commerce platform in Latin America.

It uses an MVC architecture. As a developer, it requires more work to align with this approach; however, it’s very well organized. As a designer I love when design is separated from logic.

Another advantage I’d like to highlight is the software’s modularity. Joomla categorizes add-ons in a unique way, allowing you to extend only specific parts of the layout instead of modifying all the content at once. That’s a new level of MVC that really makes development simpler.

Joomla has a great community; however, I think we can do better when a user tries to contribute through feedback or a PR on GitHub. We can be more polite so more contributors feel encouraged to share their knowledge without the fear of being criticized or insulted.

This ties into something I like to call UX for developers, which is about making certain technical aspects easier to handle so more developers can contribute to Joomla with new extensions and templates.

It's a great milestone. I wish Joomla and its community a long and successful life. If we keep working together, I truly believe we can help Joomla become a top choice once again.