Magento 2 and MageBridge 2

Just before our summer process, all our Joomla! extensions were taken off from the Joomla! Extension Directory, and of course we wondered whether we were in the right business. After blogging about this, quite some people raised the question whether Yireo was going to quit MageBridge. The definite answer to that is: No.

At this moment, MageBridge forms our largest resource of income, so quiting it without having an alternative would be silly. Also, we have seen still a great demand for MageBridge, which is another reason to keep going with it. Last but not least, various customers have purchased a year-long subscription, which means that there's more or less an agreement that we work on updates for at least one year. In that year, we hope to see the coming of Magento 2, and when that arrives, we will also introduce MageBridge 2 with some exciting new features.

GitHub and some pending work

While a lot of our Joomla! and Magento extensions are free, we felt that we are still being looked at by users as "that company that only provides free extensions to sell commercial extensions". The way users ask support for free extensions is the same as for commercial extensions. So the question we asked ourselves is, why free? The answer is that we do not care about the beer-part (free as in free beer), but we do care about the freedom-part (free as in free speech).

In that spirit, we have started publishing some of our extensions on GitHub - a process that takes some time because we also migrate with that from Subversion to Git. With this, we hope to be more transparent, at least in the way we create completely free extensions, and perhaps also attract other developers to help maintaining things. In the back of our mind (no guarantees yet), we are also thinking of publishing some of our commercial extensions on GitHub.

Magento extensions or Joomla! extensions?

This is a harder point: The JED-issue also brought up whether selling Joomla! extensions is that profitable, when extensions can be unpublished from the JED is so easy. Because of this, we made some financial analysis, and found that 80% of our income (MageBridge not included) comes from Magento extensions, while only 20% comes from Joomla! extensions. Still, 80% of our work goes into Joomla! (mainly support), plus 80% of our frustration is related to Joomla!.

Does this mean a farewell to Joomla!? Ofcourse not. But in means that (business-wise) it is more profitable for us to sell Magento extensions. That said, (community-wise) it is a lot of fun to distribute Joomla! extensions. So we will continue to offer all of the Joomla! extensions that we are currently offering, plus share new extensions that we create in the future because we need them ourselves. But our first next commercial extension will without doubt be a Magento extension.