What is SEBLOD?

It doesn't take very long after installing SEBLOD to realise you've probably never used anything like it before. You've maybe used different components for Joomla that handle different features contained in SEBLOD, but nothing that does EVERYTHING that SEBLOD can do. With such a full-featured piece of software, it actually gets quite hard to define, in simple but descriptive terminology, what it is.

The term Content Construction Kit originated in the Drupal community, and describes a module that allowed developers to build (or construct) their own custom types of content (or Content Types). A Content Type consists of fields that store information in the database, when information is stored in the database (i.e. when you click "save") it is called a "Content Item".

SEBLOD is one of the oldest Content Construction Kits for Joomla, and was first released in 2009. Like the Drupal Content Construction Kit module, SEBLOD too enables you to create your own customized Content Types in Joomla in order to store Content Items. This allows you to craft your websites in order to suit the types of content your clients will create: like events, real estate listings, blog posts, places and more.

So that's good. SEBLOD is a Content Construction Kit. But it's also more than just that.

Again, borrowing some terminology from Drupal here, but SEBLOD could also be considered as the Drupal Views Module for Joomla, or Panels for Joomla, or even Display Suite for Joomla. This is because SEBLOD gives you all the controls you need in order to craft how your content is rendered in your site's front end.

Full content views, search pages, dynamic lists, maps, charts, slideshows - you name it. The Drag and Drop templating functionality allows you to add your fields to your different views in order to define which information you wish to display. You can then go further by customising your template, or using one of the many pre-made templates available on the SEBLOD marketplace, to achieve your desired content layout.

This aspect of SEBLOD is a bit philosophical. When used to its full ability, building with SEBLOD becomes a web development process and workflow. It changes the way you think about building a website in the early stages of a project by giving you a structure to think within about how the functionality will be implemented. Instead of going hunting for lots of different 3rd party Joomla components and modules to fulfil your client's needs, you start to think about all the ways the functionality can be achieved only using SEBLOD.

After a while, you start to think about a site in terms of "Which content types will I need?", "How many list pages will I need?", "How can I streamline my content templating?", "How can I simplify the content administration process for this client?" and so on.

For web agencies, this is huge. Joomla! is on a pretty frequent upgrade path, and sometimes third party components struggle to keep up.

When you're planning migrations from an old Joomla! version to a new one, it can be a nightmarish mess of non-compatibility as soon as you have more than a few third party extensions on your site. When you build with SEBLOD, it's likely that SEBLOD is one of the only Joomla extensions you need. We are proud of our record of keeping up to date with new Joomla! versions. In this way, between Joomla! versions, SEBLOD is an incredibly sustainable way to build websites.

This is by no means an exhaustive features list of SEBLOD. We're interested in what SEBLOD is to you - whether you work with it in an agency, for your own websites or just for fun.

Let us know in the comments. "SEBLOD is..."?