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A question for the Joomla community - Why Joomla?

09.05.09

I've been posting sporadically to this blog for some time now, and we've been lucky to attract a few thousand people per month.  I generally advocate that a site's success doesn't solely reside in Google Analytics but instead, mainly in the feel of community participation it relays to people when they spend time on it.   In that respect, things are going well here - you guys post comments here and there fairly regularly and old threads are always being picked up for debate.

When I launched the blog I sought to answer its title question through the anecdotes and ponderings I was going to post to it.  Though, in the past few months - with Joomla 1.5 being released and a whole stack of new extensions being released for it, I'm still curious to hear why you - the Joomla community at large, choose to use it as your platform of choice for building websites.

So - please feel free to be as candid as you'd like, post a comment below to answer the simple question...

... Why Joomla ? 

One of the great things about the recent Joomla! Developers Conference in New York was that, with Andrew, Ian, Louis, Ron, Sam, and myself, we had all four Development Coordinators plus a majority of the Production Work Group all in one place for the very first time. This gave us the chance to talk in depth about an important issue that is critical to the future of the project -- the release cycle.

As many of you know, version 1.5 was released in January of 2007, almost 2 years ago. That means that it will be over 2 years between versions 1.5 and 1.6. I think most of us would agree that this is too long between versions. But just saying we should release more often doesn't address the underlying issues and challenges.

Fortunately, Louis had given this a lot of thought, and he led a discussion of how we can get to a more dynamic release cycle while preserving the stability and reliability that our users have come to expect. I wrote up a short proposal based on that discussion and just posted it to the General Development list here.

As I stress in that post, although we are excited about this idea, it is only a proposal at this point. We want to hear your feedback before we make any decisions. So, if this is a subject that you care about, please read, consider, and then let us know your thoughts. Thanks!

Roughly every two weeks or so, Barrie and I will be posting a news roundup from Joomla, pointing to the latest news that you shouldn't miss coming out of the Joomla project.

This is a report from the Joomla Leadership Summit now underway in San Jose, CA. Members of the Community Leadership Team (CLT), Production Leadership Team (PLT) and the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) are busy discussing the best foot forward in all areas of the project.

The PLT had our summit in the days leading up to the overall Leadership Summit. We'll share shortly the results of that summit, but we wanted to get some direct feedback from the community on an issue that affects many.

We decided to make a small change to the way Joomla versions are numbered. If you have read about the new development cycle, you know we now have a new Joomla version every six months and one long-term-support (LTS) release every 18 months. Versions 1.6 and 1.7 are six-month releases and the next release in January 2012 will be an LTS release. This way, users have a choice. They can get the latest and greatest version by updating with improvements every six months, or they can have a more stable feature set with updates every 18 months.  Maintenance and security releases will be done as necessary for both LTS and STS releases during their support periods.

To try to make this as clear as possible to users, we have decided that the long-term releases will always be labeled as x.5 releases. For example, 3.0 and 3.1 will be regular, short-term six-month releases. The following version would be 3.5, indicating that it is a LTS release. Version 3.5 will be supported for 18 months. In the meantime, we will release 4.0 and 4.1. The LTS replacement for 3.5 will be 4.5, 18 months later.

We would like to present two options to the community to decide how to proceed with this versioning approach. 

Click on the diagram above to view a larger version.

The first option (Option #1) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 1.8. The subsequent short -term releases would be 2.0 and 2.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 2.0.1 or 2.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 2.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because it would be the only version to not follow the x.5 numbering, but this version number would naturally follow 1.6 and 1.7.

The second option (Option #2) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 2.5. The subsequent short -term releases would be 3.0 and 3.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 3.0.1 or 3.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 3.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because there would be no version numbers between 1.7 and 2.5, but this version number would follow the future versioning strategy (also there would be backwards compatibility with Joomla 1.5).

Vote for the option that makes the best sense here:

http://tinyurl.com/jversion

 

 

 

 

 

The Joomla! Community Leadership Team (CLT) is currently seeking new members to join us on our team and we want YOU, our fellow community members, to nominate those you feel would be well suited! (yes, you can nominate yourself as well ;) )

If you’ve been around Joomla for a long time then you’re likely already aware of what the CLT is, what we do and how we fit into the project structure.  If that’s the case, feel free to skip to the bottom for the nomination details.  

For those of you who don’t know or who aren’t 100% sure, we’ve listed some details here to help outline the whole picture.

What is the CLT?

There is a large working group within the project called the Community Workgroup (CWG) under which certain sites/areas fall. Those areas are Joomla User Groups (JUGs), the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED), the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD), the Joomla Community Magazine (JCM), the Joomla People Site, the Joomla Community Forums, the Joomla! Community Portal, the Vulnerable Extensions List (VEL) and Joomla.org main site. Hundreds of volunteers make up the teams that manage those areas.  The Community Leadership Team, CLT, is the leadership arm of the project responsible for the Community Workgroup , CWG as a whole.

What does the CLT do?

Our CLT roles in the Community Workgroup includes recruiting new volunteers, working with the teams on daily tasks, adding necessary features to the various directories and sites, helping the teams roll out new sites when ready, as well as the overall responsibility of ensuring a healthy atmosphere for all contributors.  We also communicate on a regular basis with one another, members of our teams, community members and our fellow teams the leadership group - the Production Leadership Team (PLT) and the Open Source Matters board (OSM).  

In addition to our roles within teams, the CLT is also responsible for the organization and upkeep of the various sites in the Joomla.org family. This includes duties such as software updates, security monitoring, feature updates and overall site management.

There are also a number of administrative and communicative responsibilities where we could use some additional help such as blogging, keeping the community updated and involved in our news and decisions, community outreach and evangelism, scheduled and recorded meetings, publishing of meeting minutes and outcomes, managing our People site group, and utilizing other social media areas such as Twitter, facebook and YouTube.

We also want make a larger effort towards internationalization of the sites and communication between various regional and international communities and joomla.org.

Who is the CLT looking for?

So as you can see, the CLT has a lot on its plate and we could really use some new, fresh faces and ideas and experience to help us with these tasks, reach goals and move the Community Workgroup forward.  

We’re looking for people with the following skills and abilities:

In General:

• comfortable working with people of different backgrounds - be they cultural, professional or any other
• Somebody who can work well on their own but also contribute to combined goals as a member of a team
• Demonstrate problem solving abilities
• Ability to handle controversial situations
• Some experience working/volunteering for an open source software project, preferably Joomla, though experience that can be shared from other projects is certainly welcome
• General conduct of a professional and considerate nature on Joomla.org as well as other sites and media channels
• Must have a reasonable and consistent amount of time to focus on your leadership responsibilities each week.
• Must be willing to read and agree to abide by the Joomla Code of Conduct

Some specific skills that would be an asset to the CLT:

• Good administrative skills - Not necessarily due to professional experience, but if you’re an organizer, planner, get-stuff-done kind of person then let us know
• Management skills - whether in business or volunteer roles, if you’ve been a leader in the past, we’d love to know more about you
• International community members with English as a first or second language
• Writing/blogging/communication skills with a general interest in that area.
• An interest in, and aptitude for making use of, social media channels of communication: twitter, facebook, youTube, etc

So if you or someone you know fits any combination of the above criteria and would like to be a part of Joomla’s Community Leadership Team, please send us an email with a name, some information about your nominee and why you think they would be a good fit,  and a preferred email address and/or Skype or GTalk details for contact.

We will be welcoming nominations from today through Friday, June 10, 2011. The current members of the CLT will be reviewing and considering all nominations from which we will select and contact those we feel would be the best fit to join. You can send your email to nominate@community.joomla.org Please be sure to include “CLT Nomination” in your email title.

Recently the Joomla Community Workgroup came up with an idea to share just how much work is being done with the wider community by way of a monthly team report. You can see the source of the combined report I have compiled below here.

It's an incredible snapshot of the 100's of volunteers working on this part of the Joomla Project. Thanks must also to go to the support OSM ( www.opensourcematters.org ) gives to our project, as well as the Joomla Production Workgroup.

Read on for the full report, it's amazing!

IITEmpoweringHaiti.org is a Non-Profit website powered by Joomla that showcases the work of a team of undergraduates from the Illinois Institute of Technology who are working to improve the primary educational situation in Haiti, by helping support the implementation of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Program.

IITEmpoweringHaiti.org chose Simplweb Joomla hosting as a home for their non-profit website.

They have designed a laptop solar power solution for Haiti schools to provide power for the XO laptops, schools and Internet connectivity. Their larger goals are to foster collaboration between partners in the US and in Haiti and to create a sustainable, replicable, open-source energy solution that will enable the children to use their XO laptops freely

In somewhat of an ambitious statement last Thursday, Joomla template and extension development firm Yootheme announced that they are almost ready to release 'CCK for Joomla' - an extension they're calling 'Zoo.'

As of now, Zoo seems to offer Joomla developers an easy interface for creating content types other than the standard 'article' type which is the basis of content currently in Joomla.  The concept is exciting - but I wouldn't be so quick as to liken Zoo to CCK; you see the Content Construction Kit for Drupal ('CCK') is a highly advanced extension which provides an infrastructure for complex content types which can interface with each other and be presented in a myriad of ways through dynamic GUI-created-and-controlled views and panels.  Then again, once Zoo is released I expect a hugely positive reaction from the Joomla community and that could speed up development of its feature set; depending on how easily people can extend it.  Yootheme have mentioned that a template engine will be included; it will be interesting to see how this stacks up to the Views/Panel modules for Drupal.

I've blogged before that there are a few different people working on custom content types for Joomla.  Building a CCK for Joomla is an excellent idea and I'm loving the attention its been getting since the introduction of Joomla 1.5, though I really want to see the idea translate into an extension that is built with sustanable scalability in mind.

Ultimately I feel this functionality should be included Joomla core - with extensions being provided by the community offering new types of fields which can be combined to create content types; an approach which exists in the Drupal community.  Over the past few years CCK has become an integral part of most Drupal websites and this has even spurred a donation effort to raise enough money to get it fine tuned enough to be included in an upcoming Drupal core. 

Reading through the commend thread on Yoo's announcement, it looks like they:

• will be releasing Zoo under GPL (nice!)
• have built it in a plugin system to afford scalability (double nice!)
• are keeping Joomla 1.6's ACL advancements in mind (triple nice?)

So I'm super excited to check Zoo out and will be posting a full review as soon as the extension is released (no release date posted yet.) 

Hopefully some of the other chaps working on a CCK for Joomla like bContent can link up with Yoo and come together behind one strong solution for the community @ large.

Finding the right domain name for your Joomla website can be very difficult, so here are some ideas and tips on how to find the right one for you.

You are reading a post from: Joomla SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com

Finding Your Best Domain Name | Joomla Domain Name

Captain's log, September the 13th 2010.

Dear Community,

It's been almost three months since I took over the role of Trademark team leader. Three very, very busy months are behind TM team and I feel it's time to give you a report of what's been going on. I know that a lot of people tend to observe TM team and it's activities as a bunch of dark hooded guys up in the High tower doing the dark arts. Well, we're not. And I plan to put a stop to this public image by making TM team more open to the community.

So, what's been going on lately?

Our first major task was to clean the backlog of all the domains that waited approval. Believe me, it wasn't an easy task. Thanks to extreme efforts of Claire Mandville we managed to bring that list to it's minimum. I've been contacted by people thanking me and telling me that they completely forgot that they even submitted their domains for approval cause over a year passed since they did so. One of our goals is that such things never happen again.

TM team got reorganized internally. What does this mean? Well, my main idea was to make us all obsolete. Me, as a team leader, the first. TM team, and any team as a matter of fact, is about the whole team not individuals. If you tend to organize your team around one or two individuals what happens when one of your individuals leaves - everything falls apart. And we don't want that. The decission is made to spread the work between sub-teams of the main team and so two new "virutal" roles were created - The Domain Keeper and Logo Keeper. In our case those two roles were taken by Claire Mandville and Dianne Henning. Each of the sub-teams takes care of education of new members too.

This brings us to the next point - documentation. Since we're not dealing with the dark arts and the secret knowledge we decided to document every procedure we're dealing with on a daily basis. In community projects team members come and go. And that is normal. The problem shows its ugly face when we realize that no one really knows how are the things done. To prevent that we decided to document everything we do.

Documentation itself is not enough if you don't have a record of real people doing the job on a daily basis. In my personal opinion there is no better way to do that than via mailing list. Thus, TM team finally got it's internal mailing list so that everything we do gets archived. Such an archive is of great help to newcomers - I should know. When I came to OSM the mailing list archive helped me understand what is going on.

One of our big concerns are TM violations around the world. People using Joomla! TM without an approval or people who got an approval in the past but got lost somewhere down the road. Working with violations is somehow my personal trade - back in Free Software Foundation Europe(FSFE) I used to work on GPL violations around the world. That's why apart from working with the team on organizing things most of my time goes on checking the violations that get reported one way or the other.

How many people do you know who get lost in the procedure of submitting their domain to OSM? A lot. I've noticed that quite some people make a distinction between OSM and Joomla! and they don't quite understand why do they need an approval of Joomla! related web sites by some OSM group. In order to try and fix that we came up with an idea to move most of TM related data from OSM web site to Joomla! website. This is currently in process of planning along with reorganizing TM material so that non-legal people can easily understand what are they allowed to do and what is a violation of Joomla!'s trademark.

Three months later...

A lot has been done in just three months. I'd like to thank the whole TM team on their time and dedication. Time to move forward. Plans are set into motion and there is no going back. In order to make it all a reality we need your help - help from the community. When I started my TM work the idea of bringing TM team closer to the community was my guiding star. But how to do it? Simple. Bring the community closer to TM team.

Back in FSFE we have local teams in many countries. This helps us be closer to local communities and above all, it helps us speak their languages. I find this extremely important. Languages are a personal hobby of mine and I know the power they hold. That's why I'd like to have more people from different Translation teams in TM team. Joomla! speaks so many languages I can't even start to count them all. And that is a power beyond all powers. That is something that can make TM team extremely efficient. Something that can bring knowledge of trademark to every single Joomla! user out there.

So, this is a call to all Translation teams out there - if you are interested in helping TM team, please, reach me or any other TM team member and let's start working together.

Awaiting your responses at: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/686-From+the+trenches+of+Trademark+team+dicussion.html?groupid=579

Greetings from the trenches of Trademark team,
Marko Milenovic

So a few weeks ago, my aging iphone bought the farm, and I started the search for a replacement. I eventually ended up choosing an Android phone - the Fascinate. AT&T had been a continual source of frustration, and the recent move to allow tethering, but to have to give up the unlimited data plan, (a move most considered a bait and switch) had me looking for another carrier. But anyway, back to the Android OS. Just a few minutes of playing with the phone made me realize how really restrictive the iphone universe is. With the Android Fascinate I could change my launcher/home page, use different players, get and install apps from anywhere, and even (if I were brave) root it and start modifying the programs at a lower level in a few minutes. With the iphone, you are locked into the Apple mindset, everything goes through itunes, development is highly regulated, the interface is virtually impossible to customize. How many times have you built a site, and your client asked you for some additional information about users who register for the site? They wanted to collect their mailing address, date of birth, a favorite book, or even they just wanted them to accept the terms of service. Unfortunately, in Joomla 1.5, you would have had to install a complex extension like Community Builder to acheive this functionality. Now, however, it's built into Joomla 1.7.   Need a web app to serve your databases online? Look no further than FlexLists from MovingLabs. One of our Simplweb customers, the Upper Valley Educators Institute, needed to make their library database available to all their student interns online. Help with these non-hosting questions is all part of the service at Simplweb, so we took some time to find FlexLists.



In Celebration of the 4th of July, Joomlashack is offering 15%-OFF EVERYTHING at Joomlashack.com today!  Save 15% on: Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 Templates, Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 Extensions,  Joomla Training, and Developer Clubs.

Open Source Matters (OSM) is pleased to announce the April 2011 call for board member nominees.

OSM is entrusted with providing organizational, legal, and financial support for the Joomla! project. You can find out more about the organization at http://opensourcematters.org.  In November 2010, OSM decided to create guidelines for nominating new board members and published those guidelines here.  One of the decisions made was to hold nominations, if needed, every April and October.

Today marks the start of the April 2011 nomination period and we are looking for your nominations for a new OSM board member. Separately, we are also looking for a person to serve in an important non-board member role as well.

We acknowledge that the greater worldwide Joomla! community can help us a great deal in this election process, and make us aware of potential qualified candidates.

Assistant Treasurer

We are looking for one new board member to fill a critical role on the board:

• Assistant Treasurer: OSM is looking for someone with accounting or booking experience. They will be responsible for helping our current Treasurer ensure that all verify expenditures are explained, prepare budget and maintain financial records.

Please see the OSM nomination guidelines for the criteria that OSM uses in evaluating nominees.

Please click here to nominate someone for the Assistant Treasurer role. You are welcome to nominate yourself.

Marketing Team Lead

OSM is also looking to fill a key non-board member role. This person will not need to be elected to the board.

• Marketing Team Lead: OSM is looking for someone with marketing, P.R. and branding experience. They will be be responsible for leading Joomla’s marketing efforts.

Please click here to nominate someone for the Marketiing Team Lead. You are welcome to nominate yourself.

Nominations for both positions close on April 20, 2011 at 23:59 UTC

Follow @compassdesign on Twitter and you might just find yourself winning awesome prizes from Joomlashck and Simplweb - over a $1,000 given away yesterday. How do you get in on the next Tweetaway?

Last week we held our first Tweetaway, and it didn't disappoint. Over a couple hours we gave away more than $1,000 worth of prizes, including:

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