Growing Pains of the Past, Current Endeavors and the Exciting Future of ‘corePHP’

Welcome to the new ‘corePHP’ website! Over the next few weeks we will be fine tuning what’s left and adding more products and services. Our ultimate goal is to provide the best website development and design tools around. Over the past year we have hired new employees to keep up with your requests. We have also expanded into new areas to better serve your needs, like high quality print design and Data Disk Recovery. For more new services, check out our services section.

Growing Pains

Because we branch out into so many areas, many of you have asked about the direction that ‘corePHP’ is eventually planning to take.We believe that one of our strengths as a company is the ability to integrate many different skills to provide for all of your needs. That’s why we have chosen to expand our company by hiring specialists for areas such as design, printing, project management, programming (of course!), and large-scale projects.

‘corePHP’ has grown by leaps and bounds since it began, but the largest part of that growth happened during this past year.

For the first time, we were faced with an incredible amount of custom development jobs. Despite the sudden changes, we adapted, balanced the workload, and get our site online as well. (Believe me, this feels like a miracle in itself!) We opened our online store, which was an immediate success. Within a few months we were hired by a Fortune 500 fast food company to develop a custom online application dealing with digital menu boards. It wasn’t possible to create such a massive application while keeping up with our loyal Joomla! customers, so we took the plunge and hired our first employee to work full time on the project.

To be honest, we never expected custom Joomla! development to attract as much attention and grow as fast as it did. New requests began to come in daily – everything from building custom templates and components to designing complete sites from the ground up. Each of us had to work an average of 16-18 hours a day every day just to keep up with the incredible demand! On the one hand, we were a huge success, but on the other hand, learning to change the sudden onslaught of projects into a manageable, organized business was going to take a major overhaul!

Community Involvement

Our community business association, Battle Creek Unlimited, learned about our company and took us under its wing. They put Steven and I (Jonathan) through an entrepreneurial class to teach us how to take ‘corePHP’ to the next level. They gave us office space and helped us with the legalities of becoming an LLC, and helped us work through other strategic movements throughout the year. During this time we hired 3 new employees… a high-end PHP programmer, a project manager specializing in print development and an experienced designer for print and web. With the new help we managed to take on more development projects.  Finally, we added on a print department — which is where I started in the business. It rounded out our company very well and gave us the ability to fulfill virtually any need our customers had. Steven and I still worked double time in an attempt to keep up with the needs of our customers, so we hired Steven’s identical twin brother Michael to manage the finances, do content work and conduct sales for us. This helped us greatly and freed up much more time — hence the new products we’ve had time to create recently for our store!

The future of ‘corePHP’

2009 is going to be a huge year for ‘corePHP’. We have finally achieved the balance we were searching for. We have new resources we can use to assist our customers, and we now have the support we need to build and release a steady flow of products for all of you.

On my end, I have been pushing the limits of CSS Joomla! templates. Originally, I was excited about the reception of De-Modular Business and wanted to move it to the next level. Last February I started on a brand new CSS framework designed to revolutionize template creation. At one point, I was moving through templates so fast and was pushed in so many new directions (due to the amount of custom templates I designed for clients) that I began to see how much of it could be automated while still retaining a high level of acessibilty for our customers. There are still a few bugs (mostly IE6) that need to be worked out, and there are a few workflow issues I still need to optimize, but I believe I am less than a month away from being able to release it to all of you. That release will include a large number of new templates. From what I have seen in the community, I believe this is the first template system that works in both 1.0 and 1.5 natively. This is great for those who still need a 1.0 site, but would like to upgrade in the future. We will also create a new community for people who want to learn how to build templates for Joomla!. I know there are quite a few blogs out there that help teach users how to build templates, but not from the viewpoint of a designer. It will give you the ability to do almost anything you want with Joomla!. Whether you are trying to make your first template or are a seasoned professional, I guarantee you will learn something new all the time.

There are quite a few people who are looking for designs, but aren’t interested in a template. We are going to begin creating Photoshop templates, allowing users to create their own templates any way they want. We will also make design elements available for those looking for ideas or attractive graphics for their site. We will make those available within this next month.

We also have a large amount of components, modules and plugins coming out soon. Have you seen our portfolio yet? The component will be released soon so people can use it themselves. If you are reading this then you’ve seen our new WordPress component in use. We plan on porting all new releases of WordPress to Joomla! as well as a large amount of plugins. We will also be creating more custom modules that hook into WordPress to integrate even more into your Joomla! site.

‘corePHP’ has also been chosen as a preferred developer for Joomsocial on many new sites. Joomsocial is an exciting new social networking component (easily the most powerful component of its kind!). Expect some great add-ons from us in that area as well.

Expect Community ACL to continue to grow as we add add more and more features. We are very proud of this product. It allows a whole new audience to start using Joomla!…especially now that groups and roles can easily be added into an entire site without making it impossible to upgrade! We have MANY other exciting releases coming your way soon, but I will keep some things a surprise.

Thank you very much for your support. We do apologize for not getting more products out this past year. On the other hand, we did our best to make sure it was worth the price of membership — and we can gaurantee that this yaer will more than make up for any shortcomings! We are larger, stronger and more equipped than ever — especially now that we have a larger staff to make sure our customers have exactly what they need, when they need it.

Keep checking back with ‘corePHP’ to gain new wisdom from the Zen Penguin! He knows all things Joomla! and loves to share his wisdom with the people.

Happy Holidays from the staff at ‘corePHP’!

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