It’s been a while since I have been able to blog on the joomla.org sites, it must have been at least 3-4 months ago. In the meanwhile, an incredible amount of things have happened so I will provide a short overview:

• We released Joomla! 1.5 on January 22^nd. This is a major milestone for the project, and given the huge amount of downloads and 1.5 native extensions that are developed, it is doing very well.
• After the release of Joomla! 1.5, there have been three maintenance releases, with an average release cycle of 4-5 weeks.
• The Joomla! Bug Squad is led by Anthony Ferrara and now holds about 40 members. The squad is responsible for the maintenance cycle of Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5. Thanks to this very energetic team we are able to have a very good release cycle.
• We have processed around 150 White Papers for Joomla! 1.6. We have accepted 50 White Papers, ranging from very easy to major changes. We are in the middle of a big change as we try to move away from long development cycles, and move to an incubator way of defining projects. This way we enable more people to work on new application logic, without getting a development cycle lockup.
• We are working on implementing unit testing for the Joomla! Application and Content Management framework, this subject will be handled soon in a separate blog entry.
• The team has been present on many events, most exciting for me personally are the Joomla!days. I have attended three Joomla! Days (Italy, the Netherlands and Norway) and I can tell you that people are more and more excited.
• Google Summer of Code has started. We have been granted 15 projects this year by Google. Google again shows great support of open source and Joomla! Specifically, thanks Google! We have an amazing team of mentors, and an incredible talented group of students this year.
• The Summer Of Code program is a great learning experience for students, this year we also will guide students that have not made it into the (formal) program. This year we have a mix of framework/CMS projects, but also some nice extensions; the summer will be very nice :-D
• The Google Highly Participation Contest (GHOP) has finished. Many GHOP students joined working groups and do an amazing job helping Joomla! move forward. What a way to find new contributors…mind-blowing!

This is just a summary of what I can recall of past months. It’s been an exciting ride so far. People who have seen my presentations during the various events know that the project is moving forward in an incredible rate. It’s difficult to keep up with all that is going on and the only way we can handle more is by getting new motivated people into the project.

To make that possible we lower the barriers to contribute, and do an active search for people who are willing and capable to contribute. Getting into the Joomla! Bug squad is fairly simple, just show you are motivated and contact us and you get added. You really don’t need to be a developer to get into that team; all it takes is some dedication to make Joomla! more stable then it already is. There is a great team welcoming you so if you are interested, let us know.

Another example of lowering the barriers is the documentation wiki. All it takes is just register on the wiki, and you can start writing documentation. As of 1 May we had approx. 392 content pages and 1785 registered users (but only a tiny number of those are actively contributing).  This is up over 700 on last month so people are registering at a phenomenal rate, it will take some time for them to contribute but those who do just make it move at a dazzling speed.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you are interested, can spare some time and are motivated!

So, what is planned for the upcoming period? For sure the 1.6 roadmap is pretty exciting, and the Bug Squad is also working on 1.5.4. The amount of features listed in the whitepapers is (to put it gentle) very exciting! Beside that we work on the Summer Of Code, which is also very exciting. We are also planning a Pizza Bug and Fun event; no date set yet and we are thinking on extending the concept. Hopefully, we can tell more very soon.