It's really great to be able to talk with people who are pushing the boundaries of their software.
The Octopoos team is really expanding what can be done with Joomla. They make a content-building extension called SEBLOD, which is a very flexible and highly-regarded.
Octopoos also use SEBLOD to build sites for the likes of General Electric, Unilever and Lipton Tea.
We have a new video class on SEBLOD this week. We also interviewed the team to find out more about this really impressive extension.
1) Hi guys. Can you introduce yourselves?
We’re all a part of Octopoos, a web agency based in France very close to the city of Versailles, which is about half an hour from Paris.
Sebastien Lapoux is the Director and Founder of Octopoos, Sebastien Heraud is the lead Web Developer and main driving force behind SEBLOD, and James overseas marketing and promotion of SEBLOD, as well as doing front-end web development.
2) What is SEBLOD?
It might be easier to ask what isn't SEBLOD?
At the most basic level, it’s a content construction kit for Joomla. It enables people to quickly and easily:
- Add custom fields to Joomla’s core "Content Objects" (Articles, Categories, Users, User Groups, Notes...)
- Create entirely new types of content from scratch
- Search and list any content items.
Unlike some other similar components offering CCK functionality for Joomla, SEBLOD integrates completely with Joomla’s com_content component. This means that all of your content items appear in the core Joomla Article manager, removing the need to have multiple work spaces to manage your content.
Beyond traditional CCK functionality, SEBLOD has a suite of additional features that move it more into the realm of a Web Application Builder.
For example, with SEBLOD it’s possible to build your own CMS in the ‘front end’ on top of the Joomla CMS. Another example: SEBLOD creates the possibility to run multiple websites off 1 single Joomla instance by utilising Joomla’s core ACL features.
3) What kind of people do you see using SEBLOD?
It might sound a bit cliche, but in terms of building websites with SEBLOD, it caters to everyone. For front-end developers SEBLOD provides the capability to start venturing into building functionality without needing to know PHP and MySQL.
For hardcore developers, SEBLOD gives you tools to do fast development, build additional functionality through SEBLOD plugins, add-ons and much more.
4) You developed many SEBLOD features for General Electric?
Yes, a lot of the advancements in SEBLOD come out of our web agency work.
In this area we do a lot of work for different divisions of General Electric (GE) all over the world. When we develop some new functionality for them, or other clients such as EDF or Unilever, we eventually package that functionality up in the form of new templates, plugins, add-ons and so on, and make it available to the SEBLOD community.
5) Can SEBLOD work for directory sites?
Yes, we just finished a site in partnership with Loudbox Media in Australia: JobJungle.com.au. The site is a great example of a few different aspects of SEBLOD.
First and foremost it is a directory as you say - this is the bread and butter functionality of SEBLOD. Beyond that, it has a powerful front-end administration section for Employers to manage their job listings, and for ‘Job Hunters’ to manage their job applications. Additionally it utilises SEBLOD eCommerce whereby Employers must pay to post their job listings.
This is one of the only Joomla!-based websites we’ve come across before that offers this sort of feature.
6) Can SEBLOD work for e-commerce sites?
We're working on that right now. One of the first SEBLOD eCommerce projects was this site: Alain-Milliat.com/en/.
It works with most of the standard ecommerce functionality you’ve come to expect from other sites on the internet. But, instead of using a third-party component like Hikashop or Virtuemart, all of the products, payments, orders, shipping etc. is all managed with the SEBLOD eCommerce add-on.
In the coming weeks SEBLOD eCommerce is taking it’s first step towards General Availability to the SEBLOD community. We will first launch it in the Labs section of SEBLOD.com where we give our Platinum and Diamond corporate partners access to our latest technology. Once it has been road tested in this arena further, we will move it in to a premium component available to the public on the SEBLOD store: Seblod.com/products.
7) What do designers need to know about SEBLOD?
Not much. SEBLOD will adopt and fit in nicely with whatever Joomla template you are using. Take a look at these sites below, for example. They are running a lot of jQuery effects while the dynamic content is driven by SEBLOD.
Within the Joomla templates (which can be customised to look however you want) SEBLOD has another level of templating where you can customise the output of your lists or content items. This allows you to build templates like interactive Google Maps, Carousels and more.
