It has been a wonderful summer of code. Being part of Joomla community and GSoC 2008 has undoubtedly been the best experience I have ever lived during those nearly 5 years of academic life. Today August 18th, I am proud to announce the release of JResearch Alpha 1, a testing version which includes component backend, support for exporting/importing bibliographical references in MODS, Bibtex and RIS formats and plugin for automatic inline citation.

As can be easily inferred, releasing an Alpha version means there is still pending work, but that JResearch is ready to be tested by community, the core of open source process. That process began last week, when thanks to Neri, I could identify several defects, some of then solved today. Alpha 1 has surely more defects I hope to start correcting from now thanks to all you.

I have decided to dedicate Alpha 1 to my mentor. She has been a great support during this process: good advice, always available when I needed help, nice conversation (even when talking about other topics). I hope to see her personally once and continue receiving her mentoring beyond GSoC 2008, because JResearch will continue. This week, I will start a campaign in my university to propose its use in research departments, including the one where I work now. I started today with KOKOA (http://www.kokoa.espol.edu.ec) community. I hope to receive their feedback those days. Neri (as always) has kindly offered her help. You are super!!!

I also found a minor bug in Joomla code which I hope to report a soon as possible (surely tomorrow). That issues avoids to cancel a form submission even if the user has implemented onSubmit event in a form. The patch is really simple.

My summary of pending activities cannot be absent:

• Report detected issue.
• Define a logo for JResearch. It is important!! My announcement in KOKOA website looks dull without a logo.
• Correct pending issues reported in tracker (including the ones reported during this week). Everything towards Alpha 2 which is programmed for next Monday.
• Start frontend publications page.

Comments are welcome