Leadership Blog

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.

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.