Australian Federal Government COMET Funding for Multi-site Joomla! Solutions

Created Thursday, 06 August 2009 by Hayden Foote in General News & Events

The FII team are pleased and proud to announce that we have been approved to receive Australian Federal Government funding under their Commercialisation of Emerging Technologies (COMET) programme, which aims to "support individuals, early-growth stage and spin off companies to improve their potential for successful commercialisation of their innovation".

The funding has been granted in relation to the ongoing development and commercialisation of the FII Platfform.com suite of multi-site capable Joomla! extensions, which is an area of development and interest for many companies in terms of contact, content and web systems syndication, particularly with the massive growth in the social networking and social marketing arenas in recent years.

The FII Platfform.com development uses the Joomla! CMS to present and 'bridge in' almost all front-end user, membership, content and systems (e.g. shopping cart) functionality, but keeps administrative functionality outside of the Joomla! CMS.  This development philosophy, of keeping administrative functionality outside of any one particular CMS and 'bridging in' or connecting when/where required, will enable FII in the near future to take advantage and participate in other growing CMS markets, such as Drupal, TYPO3 and Wordpress; and has particular relevance for organisations who operate under a franchise, partner or reseller model, ensuring the centralisation of all contact, content and web systems functionality.

The FII Platfform.com development, we believe, parallels the development occuring and being overseen by other industry giants, such as Google and their Open Social development programme for multi-site web systems connectivity.  The technological standardisation emerging through (what we call) Internet 'operating' systems, through both 'open' programming interfaces (APIs) and the ubiquitous growth in open source content management systems such as Joomla!, is resulting in web presentation frameworks that assist and encourage more efficient, effective and scalable B2B and B2C communications across multiple sites. This, therefore, is the FII developmental focus.

Our gratitude and thanks goes out to Akshay Bhandari and Eric van der Staay of CLASE Ventures, who assisted us in the COMET application.