Making Extraordinary Sites with Joomla

We received an email from a customer recently that reminded us of a core Joomla value.  Whilst it's nice to have the fanfare of opening high profile public Web sites on software you helped write, Joomla's main edge has been it's ability to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.  The following story epitomizes this paradigm.

Nine years ago, I was able to work on THE project of my life, a website called exit.ca that became a transactional platform for Airtransat.com. I came in with a team after the first version that cost close to 15 million Canadian dollars failed. With a team of complete wackos we were able to start from scratch and make a new working version in about five months. It was a team of web people as opposed to a team of IT people.

I was lucky enough to work on this project with a very talented group of people but more specifically with the Ying to my Yang, Philippe Côté who has been my partner in crime for so long.

We had a blast for a couple of years then came 9-11, SARS and everything that followed. The company went through multiple restructures and at a certain point in time, it wasn't fun anymore. But the platform we had build was still our baby and we wanted to stick around because the baby was under attack. After several failed attempts to see them try to replace our platform it became unbearable and I left. Started my own company teamed up with Phil and we discovered Joomla and made some pretty interesting sites.

In August we had the chance to work in the travel industry again with the second largest travel retail group in Quebec. We knew what we wanted but we had worked eight years to build it the first time round.

This time, with the help of some of your babies (Joomla and Catalog) we were able to catch up to eight years of work in about three months. I can safely say that voyagesendirect.com version 1.0 is more advanced and flexible that anything we ever made at Airtransat.com.

We were also able to use Joomla to play nice with some external partners that use Perl. We have basically extended some modules externally (such as our DEV on this page). This is Phil making my dreams come true... what can I say he's an artist... and so are you!

Thanks for letting a couple of guys have fun again!

David Joly started davidjoly.com to create virtual teams to solve their customers needs. He has been working with Phil Côté for more than ten years. They like to see themselves as a technico-creative pair.