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Six Years of Joomla

15.09.11

On September 1, we celebrated Joomla's 6th birthday. In September 2005, Joomla's 20-odd founders forked the Mambo project and established Joomla. Six years later, Joomla is one of the three top open source content management systems in the world. The founders had no idea that Joomla would be so successful, but six years later, thousands of people all over the world make their living with Joomla, and millions more update a Joomla website every day.

With an October 25th announcement on the public Joomla! leadership email list, work has begun on the Joomla! project's 2012 goal setting and budget planning proposed process. 2011 was the first year that the Production Leadership Team (PLT), Community Leadership Team, (CLT) and Open Source Matters board of directors (OSM) put in the extra effort to first define their goals for the year before they began work on their parts of the project's overall budget.

Benefits of the goal setting and budget planning process

These are the benefits of having PLT, CLT, and OSM put in the extra effort to first define their goals and priorities for 2012 and also asking them to provide input on the areas of the 2012 budget that their teams are responsible for:

• Allows our budget to be a more effective tool for supporting the project's planned priorities for the upcoming year.
• Allows each leadership team to better understand what the other leadership teams are planning to work on, which will improve inter-team collaboration and support.
• Allows the community to be aware of goals and priorities for the upcoming year, which will improve transparency and openness and enable increased support and volunteer contributions.
• Will make it easier to bring in more sponsorship contributions, due to prospective sponsors having a better understanding about what initiatives their contributions will be supporting.

Changes made for the 2012 proposed process

Some significant changes have been incorporated into the 2012 proposed process based on lessons learned from the 2011 process. Some of these changes are a result of lessons learned during the 2011 process, including feedback from the community. Other changes are based on work that came out of a session at the July 2011 Joint Leadership Summit about creating a public unified roadmap for the project. These are the main changes that have been made for the 2012 proposed process:

• Each leadership team has been asked to define a mission statement for their team that supports the project's current overall mission statement. Each team's mission statement will be a helpful starting point to confirm that their top goals and priorities are aligned with their mission statement.
• Time has been included in the proposed process for community feedback both before the leadership teams finalize their goals, as well as before the draft budget is submitted to OSM for formal approval.
• A more detailed framework has been provided for documenting milestones, action items, and resources that are associated with each team's top goals and priorities. Each leadership team can use this documentation to help with their budget planning and their implementation work for each of their top goals and priorities. If this documentation is completed it can be published alongside the both draft and approved budgets which will help community members see where those goals tie to specific budget line items.
• Recommendation that each leadership team publish a blog following each calendar quarter in 2012 to provide an update to the community about their progress toward their 2012 top goals and priorities.
• Creation of a sample timeline that aims to have a budget ready for OSM's formal approval in January 2012.

Potential impact of proposed leadership structure changes

Proposed leadership structure changes that were intially discussed at the July 2011 Joint Leadership Summit may result in changes to the project's current leadership structure sometime during 2012. It will likely take quite a bit of time to work out the details of any approved leadership structure changes, so if we want to have a set of full year 2012 goals and a budget that is based on those goals, then our best path to accomplishing that will be to rely on our current leadership teams to carry out this work now.

Sample timeline for the 2012 proposed process

The sample timeline for the 2012 proposed process is shown below. As was the case with the 2011 process, participation by leadership teams in the 2012 proposed process is voluntary. Each leadership team may choose to take a different path regarding both their goal setting and their budget planning work for 2012.

• October 25: Announce 2012 goal setting/budget planning process to leadership teams.
• November 2: OSM Treasurer publishes blog about 2012 goal setting/budget planning process.
• November 2: Each leadership team creates their mission statement, and begins working on their proposed top 2012 goals/priorities.
• November 5: OSM Treasurer provides budget spreadsheet templates to all leadership teams.
• November 9: Each leadership team defines their proposed top goals/priorities and they each independently publish a blog/JPeople discussion or other method of collecting community feedback about them.
• November 16: Public feedback on each leadership team’s proposed top goals/priorities closes.
• November 30: Each leadership team finalizes their top goals/priorities and their milestones/action items/resources.
• December 7: Each leadership team submits their proposed 2012 budget to OSM Treasurer along with their mission statement, goals/priorities, milestone/action items/resources document.
• December 21: Budget committee reconciles consolidated 2012 budget.
• December 22: Blog and JPeople discussion for community review along with draft budget, and leadership team mission statements, goals/priorities, milestones/action items/resources are published.
• December 29: Public discussion closes.
• January 2012: OSM votes to accept budget.

Though it may not win any awards for innovative design, development consultant and Rotterdam School of Management professor Gregory Maassen's personal website is an excellent example of how Joomla provides a ton of accessible functionality.

developmentwork.net was built in Joomla 1.5x with a suite of free/Open Source extensions by Gregory himself.  As its main function was to serve as a repository for his publications, docman served well in easily creating an interface for organising file downloads and offering them up within articles as referenced links.

Some info about the site from Gregory's write-up on the Joomla forums:

It serves as an archive and introduction to my academic publications, and management experience with business development and judicial reform projects, legislative initiatives and educational programs in developing countries such as Afghanistan, Macedonia and Armenia.

The audience of the site is relatively limited:

• Students and other course participants who like to download materials;
• Other professionals who work in developing countries who may want to read some of my work and/or get inspiration to set up their own sites for their projects; and showcase what is possible with Joomla.

Its definately worth checking out the site and referring to his post on the forums describing the process by which he came to the right mix of extensions to create this site.

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A few years ago, fluid width templates were all the rage. Accessibility guys loved them, and it was cool to grab the corner of your browser window and see all that content slide around. Heck, my original Joomla template tutorial published at joomla.org even showed you how to make them. We even sold templates that had the more advanced "jello layout" (fixed side columns and fluid middle). But now, at Joomlashack, we don't make fluid templates, but focus on fixed width templates. I firmly believe they are misplaced on today's web.

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.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a popular blog post about “Making Social Media Work”. I used some of those ideas in a presentation at Joomla Day New England (link has audio and video!) about how to use Social Media to get sticky traffic for your site. One recurring question was about Facebook etc buttons. The hard reality is that putting facebook buttons on your site isn’t going to do much. I used the example of cnn.com only getting a couple of hundred likes on a lead story. For most of us, we don’t have CNN’s traffic, and our buttons just end up un-liked and lonely. So what's a better way to use Facebook?

As part of the Joomla! project's 2012 goal setting and budget planning proposed process, the Open Source Matters board of directors (OSM) has come up with some ideas for possible top OSM 2012 goals and priorities. Those ideas are listed below.

As we creep up to the second anniversary of the Joomla Site Showcase in April, I'd like to share some of the experiences myself and the team has had. The current team consists of:

We're pleased to announce the availability of our newest in-house project from Design Guru. Its a distribution package of Joomla we're simply calling 'Seedling.'

[ * Download the press release: pressrelease-seedlingrelease.pdf ]

Seedling's distribution of Joomla is a packaged solution that includes the latest release of Joomla CMS; pre-configured and optimized including a suite of extensions and tools. It installs on a host/server quickly and easily, featuring a customizable template and demo content which you can edit or replace to create a powerful website.

With Seedling there is no need to spend time and energy installing Joomla, then figuring out how to configure it before shopping for additional plugins and modules to install.

Seedling saves the average user weeks by ensuring that major 'web 2.0' functionality comes with the package. Installation is simple and takes minutes. Each install includes sample blog posts and articles to demonstrate how a site can be easily set-up.

In addition to pre-loading Joomla with extensions and sample content, Design Guru's bespoke 'Seedling Blog' template is pre-installed and offers simple configuration options – allowing users to change the look of their Seedling website by simply choosing colour options from drop-down selections. As well, our template lets you display an optional site title, slogan and logo.

You can find out a lot more about Seedling over @ http://www.plantseedling.com and through this walk-through video we put together last week.

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Its amazing to look back on some of the most 'recent' posts here on WhyJoomla and see that they were infrequent and published so very long ago. 

There are many reasons for my neglect of this blog - mainly these are related to our not having worked with Joomla much at Design Guru studio (my web design/development firm) lately, but also because every time I would look at the site these past months I would shudder at the thought of cleaning out all of the spammy comments which had accumulated in the Compojoom commenting plugin were using.

Well, client work or not, I've decided to tap myself into the Joomla community again and fire up this blog - unfortunately this means that I had to do away with the old commenting system and delete hundreds of valid comments in the process to shift over to using Disqus (thanks to JoomlaWorks' plugin), but I think it will make for a more enjoyable blogging, and reading, experience for us from now on.

Its good to be back - expect regular posts at least weekly from me!

- Qasim Virjee

 

In May, Brad Baker started this blog series with a roundup of informative reports submitted from each CWG team on the Community Workgroup Google Group. 

Today we continue the series with a round up the team reports from July and I also encourage you to check out the June reports, if you have not already had the chance to do so.

Carry on reading for some incredible news and stats from the hard working teams within the CWG.

Joomla 2.5 is due out in January, which is the culmination of the 1.6/1.7/2.5 series. Now is the time to be mapping out those things we want to accomplish in the next series, which will culminate in the 3.5 release in July 2013.

At the recent joint summit we discussed the process for establishing goals and milestones for the long-term Joomla releases. We want more seats at the table for the technical discussions on how to move things forward. Once every six months the PLT and developers will meet just before or after an existing event to work on the roadmap.

Our first Roadmap Meeting will be on Friday, October 21, 2011 in New York City, the day before Joomla! Day NYC 2011. This is a working session that is open to anyone interested in working on designing or creating features for the next major release of Joomla. Our goal is to come out of this meeting with working documents for implementing different features.

There is no cost to attend the event but you must register in advance. Not everyone with an interest in working on this will be able to attend in person so we are exploring options for including virtual attendees.

We encourage everyone to have a voice and to vote or add ideas to the Idea Pool at ideas.joomla.org.

For details, see the posting in News at the Developer site.

Comments are welcome and can be shared in at the JPeople site in this thread

Brian Teeman pointed out a great new feature in Joomla 1.7 that you can use with many of your articles. New formatting is offered for the Page Break feature, adding extra functionality for Joomla articles.



Joomla security - one of the most frequent topics of conversation among Joomie's (usability is a close second) - is a complex area and the technicalities of it quickly get ahead of most Joomla users. Often, it's a conversation about the reputation Joomla has about security that starts "Is Joomla secure?" People are often concerned about the seeming high number of hacked Joomla sites, and people defending Joomla pointing at the need to update 3rd party extensions or use good hosts. There are many specific things you can do to make your site secure. They range from the obvious to making sure folder permissions are correct on the server, to esoteric like changing the jos_ MySQL table prefix that Joomla uses. For 99% of sites, security boils down to: 1. Use a good host, that means paying more than $10 a month. 2. Backup lots. Be like Nike... Just DO it 3. Patch often. Joomla and all your extensions. I received a review copy of Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia from Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already know about Images and the image manager in Joomla!. But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors. This [...]

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Joomla! Multimedia – A Book Review about Images, Video and More… | Joomla Mulitmedia

Last week the Joomla Project team released Joomla 1.5.12, codename "Wojmamni Ama Woi." No explanation for the Swahili meaning was given, but this version's various security and bug fixes are easily explained by checking out the project's 1.5.12 release.

 

The notes on Joomla.org[...]

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