Leadership Blog

OSM Board Members Take New Leadership Roles

ryan.ozimek@opensourcematters.org (Ryan Ozimek) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:09:56 +0000

I'm pleased to announce that the OSM Board has new leaders filling critical roles in our organization.

During the past few months, I've spearheaded a project inside Open Source Matters (OSM) to delineate clear roles and responsibilities for a few important positions within our organization. The goal of this project was to enable our team to more effectively match board members' talents with positions that set them up for success and provided clear objectives and responsibilities. By putting this project into action, Board members are able to clearly understand what is expected of them within each position, as well as measure their success more objectively with metrics developed by them and their fellow teammates.

This project also provides the Board an opportunity to have a written understanding of the scope these positions. In the professionalizing of our Board, I strongly believe that actually writing down these positions roles and responsibilities are key to us achieving our goals, and keeping our sanity. I've even gone as far as to tell candidates for Board positions that one of their key goals should be to find ways to make themselves "obsolete", or in other words, ensure that when it's time for them to hand over their leadership position to another colleague, the new leader can focus on innovation rather than needing to rebuild systems from scratch.

What Happened to the Donation Page ... Revisited

elin.waring@opensourcematters.org (Elin Waring ) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

You probably didn't notice, but recently we have republished the "Support Joomla!" page. We also have a new "Support Joomla!" module for anyone to use. This is exciting because for the past several years we have not been able to ask the Joomla! Community for financial support. What happened?

As I mentioned back in February, at the advice of our attorneys, and with a lot of reflection, the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) had been exploring the possibility of "correcting" its corporate charter. Those corrections have now been made, and this post will explain what that means. The specific changes could not be discussed previously because they were legal advice, but now we can do so. There are complicated legal and financial reasons for making these changes which I am going to try to explain in this post. It will be a little heavy going, so before I start let me stress the two main points:

OSM will always remain a not for profit organization.
This change will allow OSM to ask for money for support of the Joomla! Project.

Mooing Forward With Joomla! 1.5

ian.maclennan@joomla.org (Ian MacLennan ) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:44:10 +0000

Since the release of Mootools 1.2, we have found ourselves facing a rather difficult question - what do you do with the 1.5 core? Unfortunately, the changes that came in Mootools 1.2 were significant enough that backwards compatibility with Mootools 1.1 was a difficult task. I like to compare it to the difference between Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5. We did a lot of house cleaning and made our framework much smoother and much cleaner.

Such is the case for Mootools 1.1 and Mootools 1.2. The new Mootools represents a significant step forward.

As a result, Joomla! developers have found themselves in a difficult position. Do you use the outdated version of Mootools, thereby reducing compatibility issues and making life easier for users, or do you use the new version and attempt one of a variety methods of overriding the core framework.

We hope to change all of that in the near future.

As has been previously mentioned, it is our plan to give Joomla! 1.5 an upgrade to Mootools 1.2. This will allow developers to take advantage of the improvements that this new version offers and to write code that will endure into the future.

We have set a target release date of July 15, 2010 for Joomla! 1.5 with Mootools 1.2.

The Gory Details

I previously released an upgrade plugin for people to test out which replaced the core JHtmlBehavior class. This plugin implemented the JHtmlBehavior::framework method that has been added in trunk. The Mootools upgrade that will be included with Joomla! 1.5 will follow along in this direction.

After the 1.5 update is uploaded, the plugin will be installed the first time an administrator logs into the administrator panel. They will also be presented with a message asking them if they would like to enable the plugin. Once the plugin is enabled the site will then be using Mootools 1.2.

When the plugin is enabled whenever the framework Mootools library is loaded Mootools 1.2 will be loaded with the compatibility layer.

The hope is that even with the upgrade activated, there will be no negative impact on sites. However, in the event that the upgrade does cause problems, it will be easy for administrators to disable the plugin and restore their site to the previous state.

We're excited about this development and are grateful to the folks at Mootools who have worked with us to provide a compatibility layer that could make this possible.

The code is a work in progress. If you would like to check it out you are free to check it out from http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/branches/mt12.

Joomla! Community Workgroup May 2010 Report

brad.baker@joomla.org (Brad Baker) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:39:56 +0000

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!

What is 'contributing' to an Open Source Project? Take three

brad.baker@joomla.org (Brad Baker) — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:19:46 +0000

Back in Nov 2006, I wrote the following blog post: What is 'contributing' to an Open Source Project?

Every so often I like to take a look at how we are now doing, in comparision to how we have been doing in the past. Having taken the time to do so recently, I'm really encouraged, and hopefully as a follow up in my series, I hope you'll benefit for reflecting with me, if you've been around for a while, or if you're only new, joining me and contributing.

Let me start with my conclusion I wrote back then:

There is no utopia. No one, and no project, is perfect. Do we have faults, yes, some of them may be more important to you than they are to me, however the fact remains, if you are here for Joomla, the structure is already in place (maybe not ideal, or perfect) for your contribution to be accepted.

From my point of view, this still stands as true today as it was almost 4 years ago when I first wrote this. However, what I'm most encouraged about is the progress we have made in being able to accept the many and varied contributions of so many people. In some ways our structure has also improved to facilitate this. Let's dig a little deeper into this now.

What is contributing to an Open Source Project?

Joomla! 1.6 help screens: Call for help

chris.davenport@joomla.org (Chris Davenport) — Sat, 08 May 2010 11:00:21 +0000

With the release of Joomla! 1.6 beta 1 looming large, the time has come to start ramping up the user documentation effort in anticipation of that milestone. One of our highest priority goals is to have a complete set of up-to-date help screens available by the time 1.6 goes stable and preferably before then so that the translation teams have time to do their work too. To help us achieve that goal I'm looking for volunteers to form a small team that can work to write the new help screens. This is a perfect opportunity for those of a less technical bent to make a significant contribution to the Joomla! project.

The trunk now includes a modified help system that pulls help screens from the wiki at http://docs.joomla.org. This is fully functional and you can see it action by installing the latest SVN code or one of the nightly builds. But right now, clicking on the administrator toolbar help buttons will bring up only holding pages, most of which pull the old Joomla! 1.5 help screens as a temporary measure.

There is a complete list of the Joomla! 1.6 help screens here: http://docs.joomla/org/Help16:Help_screens and this also acts as a control sheet showing progress towards our goal of having all the help screens completed by the time 1.6 goes stable. As you can see, there are around 50 screens to be completed. At the present time most of them are "transclusions" of the old 1.5 help screens; that is to say, they contain a simple one-line statement that pulls in the old content. Every single one of these will need to be replaced with new content that covers 1.6 specifically. This is not as daunting as it might at first appear; there is much in the 1.5 help screens that can be carried over into the 1.6 screens.

So, I'm looking for people who are willing and able to carry out one or more of the following tasks:

write new help screens, based on the original 1.5 help screens. You don't need to have deep knowledge of 1.6 to do this, but a willingness to learn is essential. Familiarity with wiki syntax is helpful, but not essential as everything you need to know about the wiki can be learned in about 10 minutes.

create screenshots of all the required elements and upload them using the wiki image naming conventions. On some images you will need to use some kind of annotation tool to highlight specific aspects of an image, so you will need to be familiar with image editing tools with this capability.

proofread the help screens, correcting typographical and grammatical errors and ensuring that they actually make sense!

monitor changes to 1.6 as they occur and be able to flag where changes to the help files are needed. There will doubtless be changes to the user interface during the process of moving from beta to stable and we don't want to miss anything!

This is a great opportunity for non-developers to contribute something really important to the project. If you'd like to get involved then please contact me at chris.davenport@joomla.org and we can get started straight away.

Welcome Paul!

ole.ottosen@joomla.org (Ole Bang Ottosen) — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:02:42 +0000

The Community Leadership Team is pleased to announce that Paul Orwig has accepted our invitation to join the team.

Paul has already demonstrated great leader skills in his various volunter roles as webmaster of the joomla! community website and as lead person of the new Magazine, and we all look forward to working closer with him.

Welcome to the team!

Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears

louis.landry@joomla.org (Louis Landry) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:48:16 +0000

The success of any software release in an Open Source project depends on people getting involved, and Joomla! 1.6 is no exception. As we get closer to a stable Joomla! 1.6 release I wanted to take a moment and go over the timeline to stable and how you can play a part in making it better, faster.

Microsoft signs the Joomla! Contributor Agreement

Sam.Moffatt@joomla.org (Sam Moffatt) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:50:04 +0000

Microsoft has signed the JCA (Joomla! Contributor Agreement), and we've got some of their code in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk. There, I said it. It feels like it should be so much more doesn't it? Don't worry, I won't end the blog post there.

Ask The Joomla! Team

Robert.Deutz@opensourcematters.org (Robert Deutz) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:20:36 +0000

As you may know the Joomla leadership teams have been working hard to increase our transparency and open our disussions and decision processes. We hope we're moving in the right direction and you as a community sent a lot of constructive feedback from the "Better Communication With the Joomla Community" blog post.

Today we announce the "Ask the Joomla Team" communication channel.

Request for Comment: Joomla! Contributor Agreement

louis.landry@joomla.org (Louis Landry) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:19:33 +0000

There are some pretty exciting changes coming with regard to how we work on Joomla!. In the near future we are going to be allowing developers to register accounts via our Joomla! Developer Network site and be given access to commit code to our subversion repositories with those accounts. We will be keeping the trunk and release sections of our repository secured for trusted maintainers, but anyone will be able to create and work in branches so that more people can be working collaboratively on making Joomla! better.

While these changes are a fantastic step towards facilitating access to the core software, they also potentially expose the project to some problems. Historically, gaining commit access to the core repository has come with earning the trust and favor of the existing committers. This has kept the group relatively small, and given us all good assurances that the people who are committing code understand the ramifications, both legal and social, of having that privilege. By opening up to self-registration we are losing some of that assurance, so we felt it was important to formalize the terms under which we accept contributions to our project repositories.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with OSM, the Production Leadership Team, and obviously OSM’s attorneys to come up with what we believe to be a great solution to these challenges: the Joomla! Contributor Agreement (JCA). The JCA is based on the Sun Contributor Agreement, version 1.5, by Sun Microsystems, but obviously reworked for our purposes. My hope is that it will make expectations for both the contributor and the Joomla! project more clear as we move into the future. What I am presenting here today are three draft documents, and I am asking for your feedback.

Welcome Wendy and Ole!

ken.crowder@forum.joomla.org (Ken Crowder) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:49:40 +0000

The Joomla Community Leadership Team is proud to announce the addition of two new members.

Wendy Robinson is currently on the OSM board. She will be leaving OSM when her term is up in February.

Ole Ottosen was already on the Production Leadership Team, but found that most of the work he was doing was for the community side of the project. Ole's move from the Production Leadership Team to the Community Leadership Team is effective immediately.

With a new year upon us, we welcome both Wendy and Ole to the team.

Archiving White Papers Forum

andrew.eddie@community.joomla.org (Andrew Eddie) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:16:29 +0000

This is just a short note to say that we've asked the Forum Admins to archive the White Papers forum while the Production Leadership Team works on a replacement in conjunction with the rebooting of developer.joomla.org and the commencement of new development initiatives this year. The content will be kept for some time as there is good material in there to work off. More information about a replacement process will be forthcoming as soon as we can make it available to you.

Welcome Christophe and Jean-Marie!

ole.ottosen@joomla.org (Ole Bang Ottosen) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:32:10 +0000

The Joomla! Production Leadership Team is pleased to welcome two new members, Christophe Demko and Jean-Marie Simonet.

They have both demonstrated remarkable and continued contributions for joomla 1.5 and the upcoming joomla 1.6, and their combined insight and devotion for i18n/l10n and translation matters, will be of great importance for further improvements of this part of the joomla software.

We see them as the best people for this particular job currently, and therefore are very pleased that they both accepted the invitation to join the team.

Possible New Release Cycle for Joomla!

mark.dexter@community.joomla.org (Mark Dexter) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:02:56 +0000

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!

Norwegian Community Sponsors Joomla! Localisation Efforts

ole.ottosen@joomla.org (Ole Bang Ottosen) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:31:26 +0000

The Joomla! User Association Norway (Foreningen Joomla! i Norge) and the Joomla! Project are delighted to announce a sponsorship of 10,000 kr (about $1500) for development work toward a system for easily transferring wiki help content to a joomla instance. There a specific interface will make it easy for Translation Teams to provide localised help. This will provide vital support the project's vision of "people around the world using their preferred languages" and "People publishing and collaborating in their communities and around the world."

Rune Rasmussen from the JUA Norway Board said "Norwegian is as important for the Norwegian community as English for the US or the UK community or French for the French speaking community. But since Norway is a country with few people (4 mill.) our challenge is to have enough resources to do the work." This project will improve the efficiency of translating help materials for language communities around the world.

As Ole Ottosen, Translation Coordination Team, put it "This task will need a custom coding effort. The support from Norwegian community now has made it possible to free up some coding hours and provide a solution in the interest of the greater international community." The project should have a solid start with this sponsorship, and we hope other communities will also provide financial support to help Joomla! achieve its internationalisation and localisation goals.

Ryan Ozimek, who chairs the OSM Capital Committee, said "There are four great ways for people to support the project: development (code), community contributions, third party ecosystem creations, and direct financial support. Financial support to the project is integral to our community's success because that ensures the infrastructure support that can't strategically be upkept without financial support. Your funding goes directly to paying for our robust servers, protection of the community's well built brands and copyrights, and supporting our wonderful JoomlaDay events worldwide." Potential sponsors for this or other projects should contact Ryan.

Andrew Eddie recognised by the Software Queensland and the Pearcey Foundation

Sam.Moffatt@joomla.org (Sam Moffatt) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:00:45 +0000

Last week must have been an exciting week for Andrew, one of the hardest working long term contributors to the Joomla! project. Not only did he pick up the inaugural medal for an individual who has demonstrated an outstanding contribution in the Queensland software industry but he also picked up a Certificate of High Commendation from the Pearcey Awards! Andrew has a great blog post on his New Life in IT blog, so check it out for more details and great links to the awards themselves.

So from both myself and the rest of the Joomla! project, congratulations Andrew!

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!