Contributor Blogs

OSM bylaw changes regarding oversight

paul.orwig@community.joomla.org (Paul Orwig) — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:04:56 +0000

In the March 2013 Open Source Matters (OSM) board meeting, the board voted to accept changes to the OSM bylaws that were proposed by the Community Oversight Committee (COC) upon their dissolution. For more details about those proposed changes, please read this previous blog and the public forum discussion.

By voting to accept those proposed changes to the OSM bylaws, OSM has become a self-governing group. In simple terms, this means that OSM is now empowered to add and remove board members on its own, without the approval that was previously required by the COC.

Future of the VEL team

clare.mandville@community.joomla.org (Mandville) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:22:02 +0000

Since 2010 the VEL team have organised the Vulnerable Extensions List on behalf of the Joomla community. Since then the list has been hosted on the docs.joomla.org pages.The VEL team felt that now was the time to move the vel project onto its own website.

VEL Team volunteers needed

clare.mandville@community.joomla.org (Mandville) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:38:51 +0000

The Vulnerable Extensions List team is looking for new members.

Those interested do not need to know how to code or be a developer but they must be able to:

converse confidently in English

be able to test POC where applicable

have a proven record of assisting the Joomla community

This volunteer role requires only a little commitment but does require a lot of discretion as you may be dealing with exploits that will affect the joomla community as a whole.

For those interested please complete the expression of interest form by the 15th May

Joomla! 3.1 - Dynamic Tagging Across Content Types

nick@iowawebcompany.com (Nick Savov) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:33:54 +0000

It is our privilege and pleasure to announce the immediate release of Joomla! 3.1. The biggest feature of Joomla 3.1 is Tags, a built-in tagging system chiefly engineered by Elin Waring and Mark Dexter. However, it’s not just any kind of tagging, it’s dynamic tagging across content-types.

Marketing Materials for Joomla 3.1

steve.burge@opensourcematters.org (Steve Burge) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:34:06 +0000

For people wanting to blog about this week's release of Joomla 3.1, we have some marketing materials ready for you.

Here's the main image for Joomla 3.1. This image helps to show that the main feature of 3.1 is Tags.

It’s GSoC Time!

drmmr763@gmail.com (Chad Windnagle) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 03:32:24 +0000

Google’s Open Source offices have officially announced that there will be a Google Summer of Code Program this year. Because of the wild success of our projects with GSoC last year, the Joomla Community has again put together a team to mentor college / university students of any age for the summer. That team has already filled out the application for Google, and been approved by Google. This is happening, folks!

What’s on The Plate for This Year?

Last year had a major focus on the (then) Joomla Platform codebase. Six out of our seven projects were platform related. This year, we have almost the opposite so far in terms of project ideas. The CMS has quite a few more project ideas on our ideas list, which should mean great innovation and maybe some new features in the upcoming Joomla 3 releases. The CMS is an exciting place for people interested in working on innovative applications. New features like tagging and Bootstrap and new CMS only APIS have created a good infrastructure for new work and for extension developers to dig in and check out all the great new features available to them in the 3.0 series! Both being a student developer and mentoring will put you in the middle of exciting changes for 3.2, 3.5 and beyond.

Help Wanted

If you’re interested in helping with GSoC, mentoring a student, or you are a student, we’d love to hear from you. There are a few important ways that we need help this year. If you’re a programmer who just doesn’t have the time to take on mentoring a student and project (we’re all busy!) maybe you could just offer some assistance when a student has the need for some code to be tested by several different testers who can provide useful feedback.

If you are a programmer and you do have a bit of available time over the summer, we can always use more mentors. Even if you can’t commit to a full time mentoring position, just having someone available at the right time can make a difference. Just talk to us, we’ll find a way to work with your schedule and the time you have available. Of course, if you can commit to mentoring a project, we would love to hear from you too - don’t be shy!

Getting More Info

There’s a lot of information about GSoC out there, specific to Joomla and more general just for GSoC. Here’s a few links to help you out:

GSoC
Joomla GSoC

To get in contact with the GSoC team, send an email to gsoc [at] opensourcematters.org

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Community Challenge: Let's Finance GNOME!

alice.grevet@opensourcematters.org (Alice Grevet) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:42:19 +0000

Last week the opportunity to support women in tech was presented in a blog entitled Joomla & GNOME Partner Up for an Internship for Women.

On behalf of the Joomla project, the board of Open Source Matters, Inc., pledges to match, dollar for dollar, the total amount raised by community sponsors. If enough sponsors step up to fund $5700 to cover one internship, the project will fund a second internship.

As of today's date, $300 have been raised.

Let’s see what we can do together! We have until May 1 to take a stand with Joomla to encourage more women in computing!

Become a Sponsor!

We are looking for community sponsors who could donate towards the internship fund since GNOME requires $5,000 stipend for each internship, as well as $500 travel allowance, and $200 administration fee. (The administrative fee will be used to cover intern payments transfer fees and to expand the resources of the GNOME Foundations needed for growing the program.) Our goal is to raise enough money for two internships.

Organizations that sponsor will be able to have their logo listed on the GNOME website and the Joomla landing page for this initiative.

To Donate:

Please contact Sandra Ordonez, who serves on the Open Source Matters board, at sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org

To Apply:

Make sure to read up on the GNOME program: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
You must contribute code to GitHub as part of the application process.
Send your cover letter, resume, and link to any code to sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org

Kickstarting web services in Joomla

chris.davenport@joomla.org (Chris Davenport) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:39:56 +0000

With the ever-increasing demand for content to be consumed across platforms and across devices, Joomla urgently needs a RESTful web services API. It is no longer enough to just publish content on a website and expect people to use a web browser to access it. Nowadays people want to consume content on smartphones, tablets and other devices, and they want to be able to connect information systems together to break out of the old content silos. Joomla as a content management system (CMS) needs to be more open to new methods of publishing content and we need to think beyond the traditional web CMS to embrace the full extent of our mission "to provide a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration".

Joomla & GNOME Partner up for an Internship for Women

sandra.ordonez@opensourcematters.org (Sandy Ordonez) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:23:12 +0000

Supporting diversity is an important tenet for Joomla leadership to uphold. Not only does it improve the quality of work coming out of our project, but as leaders in the Open Source space, it is important that we lead by example. This is particularly true, considering the currently low numbers of women in Open Source, which according to a well-cited study by UCAM at the University of Cambridge, is only 2%

Let me repeat that again: 2% of individuals in Open Source are women. While it is true that the Joomla community seems to be an organic leader in this regard, in that our events and leadership teams are comprised of more than 2% women, we still have a lot of work to do in this area, particularly when it comes to coding. Like most other projects, the percentage of women coders is quite low.

As a result of these and other reasons, the Joomla project will be taking part in GNOME Outreach Program for Women. The program was inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code, and by how few women applied for it in the past. The program is also backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy, and has attracted the participation of many well known Open Source projects.

We are Looking for Sponsors!

We are also looking for community sponsors who could donate towards the internship fund since GNOME requires $5,000 stipend for each internship, as well as $500 travel allowance, and $200 administration fee. (The administrative fee will be used to cover intern payments transfer fees and to expand the resources of the GNOME Foundations needed for growing the program.) Our goal is to raise enough money for two internships.

Organizations that sponsor will be able to have their logo listed on the GNOME website and the Joomla landing page for this initiative.

To Donate:

Please contact Sandra Ordonez, who serves on the Open Source Matters board, at sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org

To Apply:

1) Make sure to read up on the GNOME program: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen

2) You must contribute code to GitHub as part of the application process. https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen

3) Send your cover letter, resume, and link to any code to sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org

The JED index.html Requirement Dropped

matt@natselection.com (Matthew Baylor) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 04:57:27 +0000

Effective April 1, 2013 the Joomla Extensions Directory will drop the requirement for index.html files in all folders.

Why the change?

The rule is obsolete and has not been an effective ‘security' measure for a long time. You can read more about it here: http://www.dionysopoulos.me/blog/86-the-files-of-wrath.html

The #1 error with extensions submitted to be listed in the JED is SE1 (missing index.html files) which significantly slows down the approval process for everyone. Once the error is flagged, the developer has to fix it and then we have to re-screen it. The whole process gets unnecessarily long.

Once we approve an extension for listing it’s generally not checked again, unless there’s an issue reported. It’s quite common for a developer to update his/her extension and miss a few index.html files which will go unnoticed anyway.

What is the alternative?

Check with your hosting providers to see if they have directory traversal disabled.

Utilize the .htaccess / web.config file to prevent directory traversal.

http://docs.joomla.org/How_do_you_convert_an_htaccess.txt_file_into_a_.htaccess_file%3F

http://docs.joomla.org/Htaccess_examples_%28security%29

You can comment on this blog post here.

Joomla! 3.1.0 to Release on April 24

mark.dexter@community.joomla.org (Mark Dexter) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:48:44 +0000

Joomla version 3.1.0 will be released on April 24. This will give us a little more time to test and fine-tune the exciting new tagging feature and also to fix some other unrelated issues.

Version 3.1.0_beta3 will be released on March 29. This will have the same feature set as the final 3.1.0 release. We encourage people to download and try the beta version and provide feedback.

The Tags component will be a great addition to Joomla. It addresses the tagging, labelling, and multi-category requests that have been made over the years. For example, “assign multiple categories to an article” is currently ranked #7 on the ideas.joomla.org site. Tags will address that by allowing you to create lists, blogs, or other layouts that combine articles and other content types any way you like.

An amazing number of people have been contributing to version 3.1, both with coding and testing. For example, over 50 people have helped test and fix bugs just in the past 90 days. If you want to get involved, please consider joining the Joomla Bug Squad.

Note: The above date was updated form April 15th to April 24th. Things are going well, but we just wanted to make sure we're 100% ready and there are a few issues remaining that we want to take care of without rushing it.

Pizza, Bugs, and Fun is Today - Saturday, March 16th, 2013

nick@iowawebcompany.com (Nick Savov) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 06:16:44 +0000

Today (Saturday, March 16th) is the gobal Pizza, Bugs, and Fun event. It's an all-day, in every time zone, global event that's open to all virtual participants that are interested. There will also be local venues wherever they are organized, including at Joomla!Day Boston. The key goal is to fix as many Joomla 3 and Joomla 2.5 bugs as possible before Joomla 3.1's release, which will be on or around the 28th of March, and Joomla 2.5.10's release.

CMS Garden at CeBIT 2013: Joomla vs Wordpress vs Drupal?

peter.martin@forum.joomla.org (Peter Martin) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:10:10 +0000

Last week (5-9 March 2013) Joomla was present at CeBIT 2013, the world's largest and most international computer expo in Hannover, Germany. We shared a booth called “CMS Garden” with 12 other open source content management systems (CMS). The idea behind this shared booth was to have all of the relevant open source content management systems all in one place.

Two of those systems are, just like Joomla, in the top 3 of leading CMS systems: Wordpress and Drupal.

So who won?

Community Development Manager: Status Update

david.hurley@joomla.org (David Hurley) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:19:44 +0000

As this is my initial public blog post I’d like to say “Hello and it’s nice to meet you!” I’m David Hurley and in case you’ve not seen the previous posts, I am the Community Development Manager for Joomla. I’ve worked with Joomla since before it was Joomla and have had opportunity to continue to develop in Joomla for many years. If you are interested in more of my bio, you can check out the official appointment post below (or ask me). But for now I’d like to move on to the good stuff. Over the last few days, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from a couple of great people wondering a bit more about what my role involves and what I’ve been able to work on so far. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to provide a status report of sorts regarding how things are progressing, what’s been accomplished, and how excited I am about the future.

Community Leadership Team Goals for 2013

sander.potjer@community.joomla.org (Sander Potjer) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:30:00 +0000

The goals of the Community Leadership Team (CLT) for 2013 are published below.

Goal A: Launch Joomla Volunteers portal

In 2013 we are are planning to launch a new Joomla Volunteers portal to make it easier to contribute to the Joomla community and track the progress of projects that people are working on. Part of this idea is to create a public marketplace to match skills, interests and available time of volunteers with the available project tasks. This also allows to thank the people involved within the Joomla project.

Goal B: Update community.joomla.org

The community.joomla.org site is using Joomla 1.5 and needs to be migrated to a recent Joomla version. Together with this migration the content needs to be reorganized and improved. The website should provide a complete overview of all news available around the Joomla project.

Goal C: Update extensions.joomla.org

The Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) has grown a lot over the past years and the current structure doesn't fulfill all the needs anymore. In 2013, we are planning to release a new version of the JED with improvements for the end users, listing owners and the JED maintainers. This new version will be custom made to match the needs of the JED. The JED team started to work on this already.

Joomla! Recent Download Fun Facts

mark.dexter@community.joomla.org (Mark Dexter) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:47:58 +0000

I was poking around our very own Joomlacode.org site today and started looking at some recent download statistics. As you may know, reliable market share information for open-source CMS packages is hard to find, and it is especially difficult to assess recent trends. However, Joomlacode tracks all file downloads (including those from the one-click version updates), and these do provide some useful data. Here are some numbers I found interesting.

In the last six months (September 2012 – February 2013), we registered the following download counts for full packages (excluding the update packages):

Joomla 2.5: 1,725,268 (about 288k per month)
Joomla 3.0: 796,340 (about 133k per month)

During this period, we averaged about 420k downloads per month of our two flagship products.

2013 overall project goals

paul.orwig@community.joomla.org (Paul Orwig) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:12:22 +0000

One of the agreements reached at the May 2012 leadership summit was to form an overall project goals and strategy working group. This working group includes members from each of Joomla's leadership teams: Chris Davenport (Production Leadership Team), Olaf Offick (Community Leadership Team), and Paul Orwig (Open Source Matters).

The purpose of this new working group is to work with the project's leadership and help define a three year vision statement for the project along with a set of one year overall project goals, and then to support the formation of working groups that will work on the different overall project goals.

Tag - You're It

nick@iowawebcompany.com (Nick Savov) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 06:20:20 +0000

It is almost time for Joomla 3.1 Beta and we wanted to give you a quick sneak-peek at the proposed new Tags feature to get you excited for it, which at this point looks like it will likely get in for Joomla 3.1 or at the latest for Joomla 3.2. Tags are a kind of meta-data that allow you to assign a keyword or keywords to a particular item. Since it's meta data, core and custom extensions could theoretically organize and display that meta-data in many different ways. For example, you might tag some contacts in Contact Manager as "Joomla Bug Squad" and do the same for some articles in Article Manager. You could then create a menu item (or use a module) to display, within a list, all the items tagged as "Joomla Bug Squad".

We also hope that this article will generate interest among extension developers and that you will consider budgeting some development time in the next few weeks to add tagging to your extensions. We feel this will be an important core feature that will add value to your extensions and provide an all-around tagging solution for users. The great news is that Tags is very easy to integrate into your extensions. Click here to find out how.

Proposed governance change: dissolving the Community Oversight Committee

paul.orwig@community.joomla.org (Paul Orwig) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:43:14 +0000

In December of 2012, the Community Oversight Committee (COC) notified the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) that they had started the process to dissolve their committee. That process included consulting with an attorney experienced in such matters who could draft the necessary changes to the OSM by-laws. The COC also asked for feedback from OSM board members regarding if they agreed or disagreed with this proposed change.

In February of 2013, the COC notified OSM that they had voted unanimously to dissolve their committee. They also shared a set of revisions to the OSM by-laws to reflect this proposed change that were written by the previously contacted attorney.

Joomla Project to Apply for GSoC 2013

michael.babker@joomla.org (Michael Babker) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:00:00 +0000

The spring time is drawing upon us, and for student developers, this is an exciting time of year. Google has again announced that it will be running the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. Continuing on the successes of previous years, the Joomla! Project will once again apply to participate in this program.