Contributor Blogs

JED Voting Adventures

toni.marie@extensions.joomla.org (Toni Marie) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:57:02 +0000

Accurate listings? It's a lot of work!

Voting and Reviews by Users

There are more than 115,000 registered users voting in the Joomla Extensions Directory, and most of them do it the right way. In the past I've talked about reasons we reject reviews from users, but we've never really opened up the process we use to make sure the votes are valid, honest and accurate.

Because the JED is the most complete and accurate listing of Joomla extensions available, its traffic is high and as such listings are valuable. The temptation to influence a JED listing is clearly great, and we spend quite a bit of our time monitoring voting patterns and preventing abuse. Because of the value of that traffic, we believe it is our duty to make sure the listings are as accurate and honest as we possibly can make them.

Voting and Reviews by Extension Owners

The vast majority of the 1600+ extension owners in the JED use the system properly, and for that we're grateful.

When an extension developer decides to influence their listing with fraudulent votes, they are hurting not only the other developers but the users that trust the ratings in the JED. They take our time from working on extension and review approval, and slow the process down for everyone.

Investing in Joomla! Development

elin.waring@opensourcematters.org (Elin Waring ) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:54:43 +0000

With more than 13.8 million downloads, hundreds of thousands of users, and millions of Web sites worldwide Joomla! is the world's most popular open source content management system. With this immense growth has come great challenges and great opportunities to address them.

Some of you may have guessed already that there is something different and exciting in the air particularly around Joomla! 1.6. About eight weeks ago OSM decided to conduct an experiment. Joomla! has been lucky to have key contributors to the project remain for the long haul, and thanks to a targeted fundraising effort we found sponsorships to pay Louis Landry and Andrew Eddie to each spend 1 to 2 days a week working on Joomla! development. So far we're extremely happy with the results.

Andrew and Louis' assignments are specific.The impact of Andrew having large blocks of time on an ongoing basis has been highly visible to people who follow development. We've seen fast movement on highly complex challenges in the ACL and other critical infrastructure pieces while he's wide awake. In the case of Louis, in addition to writing code, he's been doing important work in reconstructing the development infrastructure (which will be debuting soon) as well as working with the release team, development coordination and being available for consultation with people working on code.

Louis and Andrew have been providing immense energy to the creation of Joomla 1.6. In short, we think our experiment of investing in two of the project's most senior developers and architects has provided handsome returns for our community in just the past two months.

The decision to try this followed long discussion within the OSM board and the Community Oversight Committee. As part of this, we agreed that we needed to do systematic assessment of its impact. Assessing the experiment thus far, two themes emerged: we're seeing faster and higher quality outputs and a more relaxed and energized development team. Ole Ottosen sums up the results so far: "We have seen some great level of activity on 1.6 from them, and maybe more important, some relaxed people that send out good vibes of enjoying it more." In a recent review, both Louis and Andrew expressed how happy they are to be able to do this work. "I'm loving it" is how Andrew summarized it.

The experiment was started with just the involvement of the leadership teams so that we could work out implementation details and focus, in particular, on what the impact on the functioning of the Production Leadership Team would be.

To date, we are pleased with the progress of the experiment and will continue to monitor its over the coming months. Having done this groundwork we are now ready to move to the next phase and look at the important question of the impact this has on development processes and the functioning of the broader production working group. We'll do assessment of this starting in about 8 weeks (mid January 2010). At the same time we will continue to monitor 1.6 development and the responses of the leadership teams.

In doing this, OSM is making a strategic investment to make Andrew and Louis's time available to Joomla!. Andrew and Louis were both able to commit the time on fairly short notice and were excited about the opportunity to take on this work. They both care passionately about the Joomla! Project, and they are thrilled to be able to work on it at times other than nights and weekends.

We've been fortunate to have these two key developers in our project volunteer so much time and energy for such a long period of time. Based on our community's ecology, and the terrific growth of our third party developer community, OSM is pleased to begin taking this important step forward for the community. This step puts Joomla! in line with most, if not all, mature large open source projects in having key developers compensated for their work (whatever the mechanisms).

This is strictly a contractual arrangement between OSM and Louis and Andrew. The intent is that it have no impact on relationships within the Production Leadership Team or between the Production Leadership Team and members of the Production Working Group. The development coordinators are the development coordinators, they have certain responsibilities and authority as such, and they still have them.

Andrew is a committer and member of the Production Working Group. He still is and will continue to work under the direction of the development coordinators. Louis is a development coordinator and he'll continue to work in the same way that he has with the other coordinators. In recent debriefings the development coordinators indicated across the board that they are happy with how the experiment is going.

The vision of the Joomla! Project (as expressed in its Mission, Vision and Values) is to both produce great software and to continue as an independent and community driven project, and this initiative is one way that OSM is supporting both of these goals.

We welcome financial support for this initiative and will be posting more about sponsorship opportunities in the coming weeks. In the meantime if you are interested in sponsorsing please feel free to email sponsors@opensourcematters.org.

We're excited with what's happening in the project. The growth, the community engagement, the events, the opening up of development and most of all the great progress in building "a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration." It's wonderful to see the Joomla! Project maturing and for OSM to be able to provide the resources to assure long term stability and continued growth.

GSoC Geeks Ogle Googleplex – 2009 Mentor Summit Report

mark.dexter@community.joomla.org (Mark Dexter) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:46:40 +0000

On October 24, 2009, the geek factor at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, jumped even higher as representatives from 124 GSOC projects swarmed in for the weekend 2009 GSOC Mentor Summit.

Steve Fisher and I were lucky enough to represent your favorite CMS. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet people from so many other FOSS projects and enjoy the geek-gadget-grab bag that is the Googleplex.

Three giant flat-screen panels display a joy-stick-controlled Google Earth as you enter. The effect is like riding in a helicopter over anywhere on the planet. Turn around to see a wall-size display of words that people from around the world are searching as you watch. Another wall shows a world map with dots representing how many people are online from different areas.

Despite all of the gadgets, the real draw for me was the opportunity to meet, talk to, and learn from the other attendees. The take-away items came in two flavors, general and specific.

JoomlaCode November Maintenance

Sam.Moffatt@joomla.org (Sam Moffatt) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:32:44 +0000

We're all done! Enjoy! (Updated below with open issues)

Due to some awesome shifts with JoomlaCode to get newer, more powerful servers (thanks again to Rochen). However as a part of this we're going to have some scheduled downtime for parts of JoomlaCode as we reconfigure the system into a new environment. I'm intending this post to be a sort of rolling update page as I work through all of the items and get the different bits and pieces finalised with Rochen.

As these are pretty significant changes, I'm hoping to keep the amount of disruption to a minimum. This is one of the first times I've personally tried to shift JoomlaCode as a whole beast so I'm hoping for the best and expecting some issues to fall out. I'm aiming to structure the moves in such a way that we're going to cause as little disruption, move in as small a chunk as possible and get everything tested.

The deadline for this project is the end of November, however I hope to be up and running at least a weekend before then. More updates as they come to light.

14th/15th Nov 2009 Downtime

We're planning some significant (8 hour chunk) down time for JoomlaCode over the coming weekend (Saturday 14th November Midnight GMT to 8am). This will impact on all web based services - downloads, SVN, trackers and project services. During this time we are hoping to migrate the database from its current environment into a new server. This is the first of a few moves to migrate services from the current hardware onto newer hardware.

During this process we'll be upgrading from PostgreSQL 8.3 to PostgreSQL 8.4 for the database backend of JoomlaCode. The last PostgreSQL upgrade, from PostgreSQL 7.4, brought JoomlaCode to a new level of stability. Recently we've been having issues with the stability of the database layer with JoomlaCode so we're hoping a PostgreSQL upgrade and some beefier hardware will help us chew through even more queries as we grow.

At this point in time there is no major maintenance planned for the Sunday however if there is an issue shifting the database server, I will be redoing this again on the Sunday. For testing purposes the system may appear to be online during the scheduled downtime and hopefully I will be able to restore service earlier.

15th Nov 2009 Downtime

Due to incredibly success and speed on the 14th, the plans for next weekend have been advanced to the 15th. All services are offline as off Sunday 15th November at midnight for eight hours or until the down time is completed.

Open Issues

At the moment I'm working to resolve a few issues:

On the 14th and 44th minute (or there abouts), JoomlaCode may issue a Forbidden error message. This is due to a bug in the way that Subversion 1.4+ (including 1.6.6) appears to parse the authorisation file that wasn't an issue for Subversion 1.2 that we were previously on. I've filed a bug on their tracker but I am doubtful that it will be resolved any time soon.
ViewVC appears to be only returning the first revision for some reason. Not sure why but I also tried ViewVC 1.1.2 and it did the same so I'm still trying to work out what is going wrong. It appears like it is only returning the first revision of the repository. ViewVC is what powers the "scmsvn" pages for a project.
There appears to be an issue with some of the mailing lists. Some systems are having handler issues (sendmail isn't liking the PHP backends in some places) and the system is also refusing some inbound emails because of identity problems. As a result items like commit mailing lists and some bug notifications may not work properly. Some emails however are working and being sent so as to the exact problem I'm presently uncertain.

Again, I'd like to reiterate the thanks to Rochen for helping to make this happen. Without the great, professional services provided by Rochen, the web infrastructure for Joomla! would not be the same.

A Preview of Link Redirection in Joomla 1.6

andrew.eddie@community.joomla.org (Andrew Eddie) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:44:12 +0000

Joomla 1.6 will include a new component and plugin called Redirect. Its main function is to provide a mechanism to record 404 "not found" errors, and to give the Web site owner the ability to redirect those to another page if desired.

Planning the 2010 Joomla!Day Calendar

ryan.ozimek@opensourcematters.org (Ryan Ozimek) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:48:15 +0000

This year has been a terrific whirlwind of activity in the Joomla!Day world. With events on six continents, spanning the entire year, the community has rallied together to share lessons learned, make new friends, and help make the Joomla project better. At some points, there were multiple Joomla!Days happening around the world in the same week!

In our efforts to continue to expand the outreach of Joomla, and also to better plan for the upcoming year, I'm looking to the community to help me put together a list of Joomla!Days you'll be hosting in 2010. This will allow OSM to better understand the events budget allocation needs for the year, as well as providing the community with a long-view schedule of events for the entire year.

So, do you have a Joomla!Day you're planning to host?
Join the discussion!

Please note that posts to this forum thread will not be considered official requests, but simply a way for us to get an idea of the 2010 event expected needs. We want to make sure to get the broadest idea for the calendar, and then receive the official requests separately as soon as organizers' plans have solidified.

If you'd like to submit an official Joomla!Day request, please use our form to do so.

Here's to an exciting 2010 Joomla!Day calendar!

Proposals for Major Events Wanted

elin.waring@opensourcematters.org (Events Team) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:01:26 +0000

The Joomla! Events Team is excited to announce that it is seeking proposals from potential local organizing committees for up to four major events to be held on dates between the Fourth Quarter of 2010 and the end of 2011. Each event will be held on a different continent and in a different quarter. Details about the process and requirements are available as part of the Request for Proposals.

The process of selection will take a few months.

Phase one, starting today, will give local groups three weeks to put together a local organizing committee and announce their intention to work on full proposals.
Phase two will end in two months. During this phase the organizing committees will put together detailed proposals.
Community discussion of all proposals will take place in the Events Forum

We strongly encourage people interested in working on proposals to work collaboratively and to engage in discussion with the Joomla! Community on the events forum.

The events team would like to thank our friends at the Drupal Association for giving us lots of helpful advice about how to manage this process. We look forward to seeing some great proposals!

Few important changes in 1.5.15 release

kauselot@yahoo.com (Klas Berlič) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:53:32 +0000

To accompany the official release announcement, I would like to point out few of the most important changes in this release:

.htaccess change that prevents looking at your extensions XML files - while this was not a security hole by itself, it kept open doors for hackers to see what version of particular extension you are running. To put this fix into effect you have to uncomment (remove #) from corresponding section (lines 35-39) in htaccess.txt and rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess (or copy/paste that part into your existing .htaccess, must be inserted at the same place).
TEST before you put this on live site - if your site is serving publicly accessible XML than this is not directly usable for you - you would need to make exceptions for those files or use regex based rules for blocking. Also not usable for those without apache/mod_rewrite.

PHP 5.3.x compatibility - Joomla runs fine on PHP 5.3.x now (except of OpenID library)

Core components caching - com_weblinks and com_contact are using cache for the first time. Also com_content view cache comes with more refined caching logic, so that caching is disabled only where it needs to be (e.g. for users using filters). This should result in speed increases on high-traffic sites.

Other notable bugfixes:

TinyMCE is now working properly - all remaining bugs created by the recent TinyMCE upgrade should be gone now
Mootols were upgraded to 1.1.2 to ensure future compatibility with Firefox 3.6

Note:

For all that would like to enable access to XML inside their extensions, one way would be to create .htaccess in each directory that contains .xml files and put reverse rule in it (or in a directory above those directories that need exceptions - it applies to current directory and all directories bellow):

<Files ~ "\.xml$">
Allow from all
Satisfy all
</Files>

or even more explicit rule, limited only to myfile.xml:

<Files myfile.xml>
Allow from all
Satisfy all
</Files>

A Preview of the New Template Manager in Joomla! 1.6

andrew.eddie@community.joomla.org (Andrew Eddie) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:10:33 +0000

Joomla 1.6 will include some important new changes in the Template Manager. This article gives you a preview of what you can likely expect in the final product.

Joomla! Developer Conference

elin.waring@opensourcematters.org (Elin Waring ) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:38:05 +0000

The first ever Joomla! Developer conference is December 5 and 6 in New York City. Seating is limited so you should register now. The conference will focus on working with Joomla 1.6 and is oriented towards extension developers. Speakers include: Louis Landry, Sam Moffatt, Andrew Eddie, Ian MacLennan, and Hannes Papenberg.

A limited number of scholarships are available. These will only cover admission to the conference, not travel or lodging. The final day for scholarship requests is 12 noon New York time on November 4.

Please note that this conference assumes that you already have good working knowledge of Joomla! extension development and the Joomla API. It is appropriate for extension development firms, custom Joomla application developers, and in house Joomla development specialists.

Streaming is planned, so even if you can't come, you can watch.

Please note that hotel space in New York is very tight in December. It is extremely important that you make room reservations early; many hotels are already filled.