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History

This site is very young, however it has already gone through 2 redesigns and severel versions of my GoogleMap component.

It all started about a year ago, where I got an assignment at work. I had to implement a design in joomla.

As you can imagine, I was not very thrilled about this. At first joomla seemed hard to get the grasp off, however as time progressed and I learned how to setup templates to fit a design I slowly started getting a good feel about joomla. Do not misunderstand me, at present time I still feel that joomla is missing key ingredients, like better access control, language handling and multisites. Hopefully this will be implemented better in 1.6, although it does not seem that way. Why should we install components for these things? It should be right there from get go.

Back to what this article is about. Around 3 months later, I wanted to start building things to joomla. I started out with a very simple module, called TagCLoud.
This module was not that successfull in the community, but it got me starting. I was now able to create a simple module in joomla.

This got me thinking. What would be a good project, that I would like to invest my own freetime in? I had a few ideas, but at the end of the day I decided to give a googlemap component a try.

Perhaps some of you remember that the first version of the googlemap was very limited. It had basically no features. But for some reason people tried it out, and they liked it. This gave me the will to keep going. I wanted to have the best googlemap extension out there. With 1.0.1 I got closer, but first in 1.0.2 the googlemap component had what I thought was enough. I was happy about it, and decided to give it a rest for a little while. I wanted to go back to basics, and create a few small modules again. It had to be something my site would benifit from aswell.

This lead me to the module AjaxSearch, followed by SlideShow which got on the frontpage of extensions.joomla.org site as "new and noteworthy".

After that I wanted to improve on my GoogleMap component again. This time it had to be spectacular. It had to be the best component for maps out there. And I think with the 1.0.3 PRO version, I achived that.

One year later. One long year with two redesigns of the site, and a lot of work with my extensions, I sit here with a happy feeling that I got to learn joomla.