Leadership Blog

Joomla Projecting

ron.severdia@community.joomla.org (Ron Severdia) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:55:06 +0000

If you've been following the developments lists (or even if you haven't), you've noticed a flurry of activity around Joomla 1.6 in recent months. While we haven't been very good about keeping our milestones, there are a few very good reasons for that.

The first and biggest reason is we've been trying to shoot at a moving target. The scope for Joomla 1.6 was pretty basic—adding ACL and nested categories. Had we stopped there, we could have theoretically had Joomla 1.6 out by now. But while working on it, we and others in the community have been constantly saying to ourselves "wouldn't it be really friggin' cool if Joomla had...?" This kind of scope creep happens all the time in the real world, and there's a propensity to go overboard when our hands aren't forced on a specific deadline. There's always that "one last thing" we can squeeze in.

Secondly, it's the fallacy that "this will only take a few minutes to implement." Many developers (and not just developers) often fall victim to the notion that a task will be short, only to discover that it's more complex under the surface than initially thought. Minutes quickly turn into days or even weeks. It's human nature.

Third of all, there's a feeling that if something doesn't go in now, it won't go into the Joomla core for years to come. We have a pretty progressive roadmap for the next versions of Joomla and we'll try to keep a regular pace of development. Since Joomla progress is primarily determined by its contributors, the pace will be commensurate with such. So while this isn't true, some have the feeling it is.

In the past, we've had some false starts and sometimes been unclear about direction or needs, but we hope to be better at it. The Joomla Project has taken a lot of criticism during it's relatively short existence, which, deserved or not, comes with the territory. But, all in all, we're all working towards a common goal of making the next version of Joomla as powerful, extensible, and compatible as it can be.

If you work with Joomla, you know full well that the community is pretty vocal about the things they like and don't like. Joomla events are prime occasions where we receive feedback on what's working for people and what isn't. There may not always be an answer to every issue, but we do listen.

Essentially, the process of working on Joomla 1.6 is where all of this activity comes together—all those emails, forum discussions, Joomla Days, and other random "ingredients" of information go into a giant bubbling cauldron and soon becomes (hopefully) the tastiest soup you've ever eaten. Decisions are made based on what ingredients we can combine and recommending against others that won't taste good (or even spoil the stew). All is done with a keen eye on the quality of the end-product—it has to look good and taste good.

At this time, the bubbling cauldron of Joomla 1.6 is getting near time for us all to get our first good taste. We've added the ACL, nested categories work, a new Article Manager is written, new core libraries like JForm have been added, and we're working on fresh new templates for both the front-end and the back-end. We're also working on a way to make upgrading from Joomla 1.5 as painless as possible. So, in order to get a round of solid feedback from the community, we're looking to release a second Alpha very soon and follow up with a quick Beta after that.

So please be patient.

Site Showcase Team Looking for New Members

ron.severdia@community.joomla.org (Ron Severdia) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:53:43 +0000

If you haven't visited the Joomla Site Showcase yet, you're missing a collection of some of the best Joomla sites out there. We've just broken 1000 sites (congratulations to our 1000th site, the Junction Motel in Australia), many of which are great examples of sites in over 100 different categories. Check it out here:

http://community.joomla.org/showcase

We're looking for new community members to join this team. What's expected of team members? A few simple things:

1) Spend a small amount of time each week verifying site submissions. The process is quite simple and you'd need to verify such things as whether or not a site is really running Joomla and if the owner properly submitted their site information.

2) Decide what the Site of the Month will be. Each month, the team discusses what the best site is for the month. Past winners are here: http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites-of-the-month.html

3) Familiarize yourself with the Showcase Guidelines. All submissions need to adhere strictly to them.

4) Occasionally, answer community questions on the Joomla Discussion Forum about the showcase or problems with submissions.

That's it. We communicate via Skype so you'll need to be on it to share information. If you're interested in joining the team, email us at showcase@community.joomla.org.

NOTE: Submission period has expired. Thanks for the overwhelming interest!

Pressing Onward to 1.6

ian.maclennan@joomla.org (Ian MacLennan ) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:21:43 +0000

Last week Mark wrote the first Production Working Group Leadership status blog. At last Saturday's meeting, for some strange reason I volunteered to write one this week.

Work continues on 1.6. As Mark stated last week, the biggest task remaining for the release of 1.6 is ACL. The other night Louis showed me some mockups of one of the UI widgets and they look quite sharp. It is pretty exciting to see this much sought after feature finally starting to come together. Hannes and Andrew have also been working hard to get all of the pieces together. Once this gets to a workable stage we will be really close to 1.6 going beta! Keep an eye on the branches in the SVN to get a look at what is happening.

The other area of focus is the Joomla! Labs Project. As most are aware, one of the struggles we've had as a project is figuring out how to open our doors to fresh developers. The Labs Project is one piece of the puzzle that will change the way we do development. Stay tuned for more details.

Well, those are the highlights - we've come so far with 1.6 yet we still have some distance to travel as we head towards the beta process. Can't wait!

News From the Production Leadership Team

mark.dexter@community.joomla.org (Mark Dexter) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:24:11 +0000

Hi everyone. This is the first of what we hope will be regular blogs to let you know what the Production Leadership Team is working on. In case you missed it, we're the people who coordinate the development, documentation, communications, bug squashing, and translation efforts for Joomla.

Currently, we are hard at work getting version 1.6 ready. To that end, we are meeting weekly to sort out tasks and keep things moving. You can read the notes from these meetings on the Google Group called Joomla! Production Working Group Leadership.

We have also begun work on a development budget for next year. We've created a thread on the Google Group where we will brainstorming ideas for the best ways to use our limited funds to further the Joomla development process. If you are interested, you can follow the discussion there.

We are also meeting regularly with the Version 1.6 Release Team. The largest task to complete before we can release 1.6 is the ACL asset management system. If you have been following the CMS Development Google Group, you know that people have been working very hard on the design for this. This process of brainstorming the design showed the Joomla community in action. The discussion was lively but cordial and many good ideas were contributed by a number of people. In the end, we were able to reach a clear consensus around a great design.

Hannes has posted a detailed description of the final design and some code here: http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-dev-cms/browse_thread/thread/883baaffe12f023.

Oh, and one last thing. Look for an official announcement about the upcoming version 1.6 alpha2 release soon.

An end of an era

Sam.Moffatt@joomla.org (Sam Moffatt) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:31:18 +0000

Joomla! 1.0 has served us well, but after nearly 4 years of service it has reached retirement. Things are moving forward with Joomla! 1.6 and there is no better time to start migrating to the Joomla! 1.5 release!

New webmasters appointed for the community site

robin.muilwijk@forum.joomla.org (Robin Muilwijk) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:16:36 +0000

About 6 weeks ago Brad (S&I) posted a call for volunteers on the Joomla! homepage. We, from S&I, received quite a number of applications and there were very suitable applicants among them. Our goal, to get two new webmasters for the community.joomla.org site, improving site maintenance in overall.

I'm very pleased to announce that this call for volunteers worked out great. We can now introduce to you Airton Torres and Paul Orwig as the new webmasters. Both have already jumped in with enthusiasm, performing their new tasks as webmasters. Two partial quotes from there biography:

Paul has wanted to become more involved with supporting Joomla! as a direct result of how much both the software and the community have helped him and in turn the users of websites he has developed. He also has wanted to follow the great example which has been set by so many others who have freely given of their time to make Joomla! such a successful open source CMS.

Airton started developing small personal websites in 2005 while learning HTML and CSS. When his older brother asked him, in 2007, to create a web site for a Soar Flight Club he was a member of, Airton started looking for a CMS and found Joomla. After setting the web site up, he started to use the community forums to get help and was soon giving back to the community, sharing the little knowledge he had gathered so far.

If you as a community member have any ideas, question, or for example want to blog on the community site just post a request on the S&I forum and it will be picked up from there.

JoomlaCode, 10million downloads and counting

Sam.Moffatt@joomla.org (Sam Moffatt) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:28:53 +0000

The other day we passed our 10 million downloads on JoomlaCode for Joomla! which is a phenomenal mark. Considering that JoomlaCode is just under two and a half years old that isn't a bad effort. JoomlaCode has turned into a great environment for supporting not only Joomla!'s own development but also Joomla!'s free extension community. Every developer from our community has access to the exact same tools that we on the project use to build Joomla! which I think is pretty cool. But shifting nearly 3 terabytes worth of data each month doesn't happen without a few key people.

The times they are a changin'

Sam.Moffatt@joomla.org (Sam Moffatt) — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:44:05 +0000

Over the last few months we've been having some changes around the development team and how things are working. We've got a few changes coming up, but I'll start with the people changes that are happening.

Webmaster Position - Call for Volunteers

brad.baker@joomla.org (Brad Baker) — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:40:02 +0000

The Joomla Project is currently looking for volunteers to act as webmaster for our community.joomla.org site.

Background:

This particular website is one of our newer, but also growing sites. We feel it's success is also linked to the successful growing and maintaining of the Joomla Community as a whole. Currently the site is maintained by a few capable people, but we feel having an injection of fresh blood into the mix may be just the thing needed to keep this sites growth on track.

It should be noted that we already have a number of responsible people adding information and maintaining parts of this site already. For example, the Translation section of this site is maintained by the Translation WG.

Duties will include (but not limited to):

Assuming overall management of the users that are given access to this site.
Working closely with other parts of the project to supply 'space' on this site as the need arises.
Liaising with members of the Development Team if/when certain parts of this sites code needs adjusting (added functions etc).
Overseeing the approval of comments to blog and community submitted content.
Working on or with people as template adjustments may be needed to accommodate changes to the site.

You will need:

The ability to work well together and get along with others.
A good grasp of Joomla administration.
Some basic template skills would be advantageous.
To be familiar with the Joomla Community.
To be able to commit regular time each day to manage this site.
To be committed to the success of Joomla, and want to be a sharer in that.
A good grasp of English.

It is anticipated that perhaps one of two individuals may be able to work together to spread the load managing this site in the future as well, so don't let the future growth of the site scare you.

Being the webmaster of such a high profile and high traffic site like this would certainly look good on your resume, but we'd like to think you'd also be applying so you can contribute to Joomla.

Only serious candidates should apply. Please make application by sending as many details as to why you are the person we're looking for to: webmaster_position@community.joomla.org (this email address will be removed once we have filled this position)

Replies to this blog post will not be treated as applications.

Introducing Joopal

Sam.Moffatt@joomla.org (Sam Moffatt) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:04:30 +0000

Today I'd like to announce a new project by the Joomla! team called 'Joopal'. Joopal is a new CMS featuring the power of objects offered to you by Joomla! with the immense hook system delivered to you by Drupal. Joopal is based on Joomla! 1.5 and features Drupal 6 the way PHP5 meant it to be done: with objects instead of globals and incredibly long function names. Joopal is compatible with the Drupal 6 functions and maintains all of those globals for backwards compatibility whilst providing a new object orientated approach to the functions you know and love.

The power of Joomla! with Drupal configurability

Joopal permits you to use your traditional Drupal blocks anywhere a Joomla! module can do and also allows you to integrate Drupal's modules as if they were a normal Joomla! component. This permits your Joomla! site to pick and choose the features and functionality you need against two of the world's most popular content management systems!

Development Evolved

Joopal provides developers with the power of the Joomla! Web Application Framework as well as Drupal 6's many interfaces. Joopal allows Joomla! developers to leverage features found in Drupal and allows Drupal developers to discover the joys of objects. For Drupal developers, objects are a recently added to PHP in version 3 that permit encapsulation of your data and providing tools to permit the removal of globals from your code.

But it doesn't stop there! In addition to creating object orientated versions of the Drupal Core in addition to the function/global system, you can seemlessly use Joomla!'s Framework complete with on demand autoloading objects. With two popular frameworks behind you, there is no way you can go wrong!

Getting Involved

Like Joomla!, Joopal is a community driven project and we need you to help us out! Joopal needs Drupal testers to help port their components and reveal issues with the system. Joopal also welcomes any developers wanting to fix issues and improve Joopal by submitting patches or even working in a more dedicated role. With Joopal and your involvement, anything is possible! So what are you waiting for, sign up the the Joomla! Development General mailing list and start working on Joopal today!

Follow Sam Moffatt on Twitter.