Featured User: Carlos Camara (aka carcam)

Every month, we sit down and talk to one of our users and feature their story on our blog. This month we talked with Carlos Camara, Co-founder and developer at Hepta Technologies based in Almeria, Spain.

Tell us a little about Yourself

I love web development and working with interesting projects. In my free time I like sports (specially racket sports!) reading and spending time with my wife and my dog. I'm about to start two new projects which I'll probably add to JED, and I'm finishing another extension that will go into JED when it's ready.

What does your company do?

We do Joomla Consulting and development. We specialise in working with agencies and companies to empower their Joomla sites, customizing them and providing custom Joomla friendly extensions. Also we are proud members of the JEvents team, the most powerful calendar extension for Joomla!.

How long have you been using Component Creator?

We have been using Joomla! Component Creator since 2012. We discovered it at Joomla! Day Spain in which Component Creator was highly involved.

Roughly how many components have you built using Component Creator?

We have built around 10 extensions, 3 of them are currently being actively used in their respective sites, another one I plan to release it in next couple of months so that all Joomla community can benefit from it. I also used Component Creator to build a component for learning purposes, to illustrate a speech I did about Joomla development at a BetaBeers event in Córdoba.

How much time do you estimate Component Creator has saved you?

I don't think I exaggerate saying it has saved me around 2 hours of work per component, so around 20 hours. Basically it has saved me and my clients around 2000€!

Can you give an example of a component that was built using Component Creator?

I needed a component to log worksheets for a glass repair company so that they could get the reports from the insurance companies. I usually work with forms components and CCKs, but I couldn’t find a way to make them fit perfectly in this case and I foresaw client was going to need some extra customization. So I decided to use Component Creator as basically the management and the frontend form was almost done. And it worked like a charm! Customizing any other component to work would have been a real problem, especially after changes requested in the second part of the project.

Do you have any suggestions on how we can improve Component Creator?

It would be great if you could send your component code directly to a github repository so that you can track your changes and whenever you need to add more views or tables, you can easily merge with component modifications.

Also a plugin generator would be great, so that you can add events into your component and it would automatically create a plugin with all needed methods in your component plugin group.

What do you like best about Component Creator?

I think best thing about Component Creator is the clean code it provides. It generates code that strictly follows the Joomla MVC structure and allows you to start your projects with a rock solid base. It can also help teach you a couple of things about developing Joomla! extensions.