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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!