On February 27, 2010, the JUGT will be hosting a presentation by Dioscouri's Rafael Diaz-Tushman who will talk about their new e-commerce extension, Tienda.

JUGT members Alan Langford and Flavia Silveira had a conversation with Diaz-Tushman to get more insight into Tienda and how Dioscouri approaches the Joomla market with its products.

JUGT: How long has Dioscouri been working on Tienda's development?

Diaz-Tushman: We first decided to make Tienda in November 2008. We did planning until mid 2009 and then started coding in August. Planning included forming the development team, selecting features for each version, etc

JUGT: Are there any new features not found on other e-commerce solutions or was the idea to create something with all the already known/wanted features BUT much easier to use and that works?

Diaz-Tushman: We built Tienda with the site's administrator in mind. The front-end interface is simple, direct and easy; if you want to change how that looks, you can do that through your template. So we focused on administration.

The key differentiators for Tienda are simplicity of administration and easy-to-understand code that uses the Joomla MVC framework. The free version's features are enough to start a basic store selling anything from t-shirts to downloadable files.

Some of the other nice features in it are standard across all of our extensions and not exclusive to Tienda, including:

• Lots and lots of plugin events in the code.
• Built-in reports as opposed to standard Joomla lists.
• An informative dashboard that displays pertinent info graphically.

JUGT: Are you always adding to your component(s) based on customer feedback?

Diaz-Tushman: Yes. That's our strategy for all of our extensions. We have key items on the roadmap for each extension that we have identified ourselves, but most of the new features we add are culled from the feature requests we receive in the support centre. We have 65,000 users – the support centre is always clicking, and people always have a say.

JUGT: How many paid and free extensions is Dioscouri supporting at this point and are they all 1.5 native?

Diaz-Tushman: We have 8 released commercially supported extensions, not counting Tienda. We have 4 unsupported non-commercial extensions. Additionally, by summer 2010, all of our commercial extensions will have a free version available (currently only half do).

All are 1.5 native. Some have a J!1.0 version available, but as of June 2010, we will no longer support J!1.0

Here's a good summary page.

JUGT: are you concerned about people distributing your code through other channels?

Diaz-Tushman: Good question. That's something I personally grappled with right after launching the business – do we go GPL or do we encrypt code?

In the end, I realized that what people really wanted was support for the extensions, so being GPL wouldn't threaten us – the actual service/product we provide is the support.

And generally speaking, someone who gets are extensions through other channels isn't the kind of user we want or target. We are looking for small businesses and generally they will stay in legitimate channels. We have a free version of most components and a demo site – they will try those before buying support for the current commercial version

JUGT: How are your extensions handling the use of frameworks like K2 and Zoo?

Diaz-Tushman: Well, the only one of our extensions that really relates to content would be JUGA (by way of restricting access to content), and JUGA handles K2/Zoo as easily as it does com_content.

It performs URL-based restrictions, and since K2&Zoo still use normal Joomla URLs, they work with JUGA

If you want to know more about Tienda, register and join us for the 1 1/2-hour February 27, 2010 presentation. We will also be having a social gathering after the presentation where more informal discussions will be taking place. Location TBA.