Developer Joy

Beyond simply working, we’re aiming for Joy

Joomlatools Pages is not just about being great for creating Web Sites or Micro-Services with Joomla. We’re focusing on more than the feature set: we make sure that every feature works well, simply, with little to no configuration, in the most intuitive way possible. It should be trivial to develop simple things, and easy to develop the more complex ones.

We’ve looked for the most useful tools and libraries in the web ecosystem, we’ve made sure they all work together, that every use-case is covered, that out-of-the-box configuration is the most sensible, that every error helps you to resolve it. More than productivity: using Pages should be enjoyable.

Opinionated but Nimble

We get it: there are a thousand ways to write the same code. Every company has traditions about how a project should be structured, and that can be fine. But it makes it really hard to write simple documentation, to onboard new developers, and to make things simple.

Pages is an opinionated system. We strive for smart defaults and patterns that help speed up workflow, enforce consistency, and make it easy to share code between projects and with other developers.

Following these conventions will make switching between multiple sites trivial, eliminating the learning curve. You’ll know right where everything is.

Sometimes these conventions don’t fit, or you have your own way of doing things you’re already perfectly happy with. That’s fine. Our conventions can usually be configured, overridden, or ignored.

Tip! Don’t break convention unless you have a really, really good reason. Like integrating with an existing PHP app or when porting a site from another platform.

Live Fluent Coding

One of the major productivity problems that face most Joomla developers is the traditional PHP development workflow. For most web developers this will generally be:

Write Code → Compile → Refresh Browser → Repeat

This can be a major drain on productivity, as the asset compile often take a few seconds or more. Pages aims to solve this problem with its Live Coding support that comes with Joomlatools Mason. When running in development mode the workflow is simply:

Write Code → Repeat

This will work out of the box, with no special setup required. This works for php files, application config, and static resources.

Unified Configuration

Gone are the days of a thousand configuration files and formats. We’re aiming for cohesion, so a single configuration file is all it takes for Pages applications to configure every single setting and extension. Not only that, but we’ve made sure that every configurable option has the most useful and sensible defaults so you can get started with no configuration whatsoever.

Works on all the Things

There’s nothing worse than getting different results when running your application, or the IDE. Whatever your workflow, Pages applications are trivial to run in any environment, so pick your favorite tool and we make sure you get the same results as easily as possible.