NorrNext progress and achievements in 2015
The past year was rich on events and it’s time to sum up our activity and highlight the achievements for the 2015. Also it’s a good chance to talk a little bit about current plans, further releases and etc.
The start of NorrNext
A year ago the NorrNext has started in February. Being a part of Joomla community during many years, we have been involved in web development and launched this website a year ago as a new way of our creative research. The history of the NorrNext has began from bunch of elements for ZOO CCK and some free modules.
Events and conferences
Half of our team have visited JandBeyond - the most significant Joomla conference in Europe that took a place in beautiful Prague, Czech republic and it was very exciting and nice moment in our life. We have had lot of fun and made lot of interesting talks with people who represents Joomla in different countries and it was unforgettable charm of international community, so JandBeyond is definitely a must-have event to visit.
Speaking at JoomlaDay Germany. Another amazing experience was JoomlaDay Germany that was held in Hamburg city in September 2015. Our representative have visited this event and prepared a session. After JandBeyond it was very pleasant to meet colleagues, friends and to make new contacts with active persons from German community. For Eugene it was a first experience of speaking at the foreign conference and, of course, it became a memorable event. Thanks to all people we have talked with, you are cool! :-)
Speaking at JoomlaDay Poland. We’re honored to visit and to speak at the second national event related to Joomla that was held a week after German conference. NorrNext representative came to JoomlaDay Poland in Gdansk city with another session. What to say? It was absolutely fantastic event that exceeded all bold expectations: the event took a place in building of the park of technology and research. The organization was thought out to the last detail: there was a special room for all foreign speakers and we got local international event like JandBeyond. Absolutely exciting and warm event. A detailed report can be found here (in Russian).
Partnership and contribution
During the past year we have contracted a partnership deal with Joomla extension and template providers: Joomlashine, JoomUnited, ReadyBytes, Joomplace, Techjoomla, Web357, Joomla51 and others. That’s so important to get in touch with colleagues and help with promotion and advertisement campaigns. We’re proud to get in touch with our partners and always ready to discuss any ideas concerning collaboration. See Partners section.
Also it was a nice chance for us to make a little contribution to Polish Joomla community and we provided discount coupons for JUG Silesia and JUG Jawor as information sponsors. We understand that the power of Joomla begin from local groups and international collaboration is a must-have part of our strategy. It was a positive experience to stay connected with local JUGs and we’re satisfied of that.
Product releases
Our team have spent uncounted number of days, nights and coffee cups to work on NorrCompetition - the first contest voting extension for Joomla. We decided to focusing on product’s quality and announce a stable version without intermediate beta-versions. The extension was released in June and comes with a bunch of plugins, detailed documentation and we must admin we are proud of the result.
Soon we’ve released additional commercial modules: NorrCompetition Carousel and NorrCompetition Grid that brings extra features and can help with adding dynamic elements on front-end of the website.
We’re pretty exciting about new technologies and pay attention on experimenting and work with another systems apart of Joomla activity. We found Pagekit - a long-promising modular CMS based on Symfony from YOOtheme and going to produce extensions for this CMS too. As a first experiment we’ve released PKB Social - a social groups widget and PKB Social Share - a nice buttons plugin to share pages in social networks.
Finally, at the end of the year we’re released two new elements for ZOO since this CCK is a good tool to create websites and we’re glad to provide more elements that can extend standard features of this content kit. Here we go with Social Share for ZOO (analogue of Pagekit plugin) and Magic Slideshow for ZOO - a smooth gallery with carousel and slideshow feature that can enrich your content with extra dynamic effects and good looking gallery.
Localisations
During the year we’ve been worked under NorrNext site improvements and prepared an environment for localisations of our extensions. We joined Open Translators project (Transifex) and linked our products, so every person can check out the availability of their language localisation directly at NorrNext site. We pay attention to making our extensions affordable to the local community and look forward to get in touch with translators. During a year NorrCompetition got more than 10 localisations which is really great result! We kindly thank all contributors for their incredible help of making our products more accessible.
Further Plans on 2016
This year we’re going to focus on developing new extensions and on NorrNext project at all. There are lot of ideas and plans that need to be released and we working hard to make dreams come to the true.
In few days new version of NorrCompetition 1.4.0 will be out and we go on working on new interesting extensions. It’s not a time to announce them, so let it be a little secret for a while. Also NorrNext website will get some improvements, as well as we’re planning to record video tutorials for existing extensions to make it more comfortable for end user to examine and configure our products.
Finally, we want to thank each user for their questions, reports and contribution. Feedback is what stimulates us and show we’re on the right way. Thank you all.
We wish you all the best in 2016 year!
Sincerely yours,
NorrNext team
