Joomla! Developer Site

We're very close to the second Pizza, Bugs and Fun (PBF) event. As you might have noticed, we have extended the PBF event for a second weekend and now have participants from almost every continent. If you are able to join us at one of these venues, we would love to have you. If you can't come to a venue but you still want to help, you can just sign in from your location.

Joining in is fairly easy but only Bug Squad members have access and can manage the tracker. We might consider opening it up for the PBF event, but somehow we think that will become a major mess ;-) Like the first PBF event, we set up an easy way to join the PBF participants. When you arrive in the pizza shop, check into the Bazaar by doing these things:

1. Sign on to the IRC channel (#joomlapbf on freenode) and introduce yourself to the others. Never used IRC? Learn more here and here.
2. Join in the discussion and get to know everyone. If you have any questions, feel free to ask! At any point, if you have questions, this is where to ask!
3. If you plan to help with testing bugs or creating patches, register on JoomlaCode so that you can add comments to the artifacts.
4. You also need to register on the shared Google Document. When you want to get registered, please ask in IRC and the PBF team will contact you to get your e-mail(g-mail) account.
5. If you plan to assist with documentation, register on docs.joomla.org so you update to Wiki.

Some will think "Why should I participate in the Pizza, Bugs and Fun event? Why not just let others fix bugs and write documentation for Joomla!?" After all, you likely have too many responsibilities in life, as it is. Perhaps you don't see yourself as someone who has the kind of talent needed to help the Joomla! project. Maybe you really would like to help, but you have no idea how to get started. If you are thinking this way, you are not alone. In fact, those are typical reasons people do not participate.

We eagerly announce the second Joomla! Pizza Bugs and Fun event scheduled for the weekend of June 21 and 22. It's hard to believe that six months have passed since the first Joomla! Pizza Bug and Fun event. The first PBF helped finalize Joomla! 1.5 and, if all goes as planned, this second event will help prepare Joomla! 1.5.4 for release early in July.

This opportunity is not restricted to those who can code since there are a wide variety of important tasks that will be offered in a Joomla! Bazaar over the weekend. This is a great way for Joomla! developers, designers, site builders, and end users all over the world to give something back to the project and be able to claim "I helped make Joomla! better."

The Bugs

For our first PBF event, we targeted priority 1 and 2 bugs and tested the entire application. Since its release, Joomla! 1.5 has been very stable and there are no serious bugs to fix. But, there are a number of medium priority items that require patches and testing. If we are able to empty the tracker during the weekend, it would be an important accomplishment for the community.

In my previous post, I talked about lowering the barriers for contributors. So far the feedback has been pretty inspiring. In this blog post I want to talk about another way of contributing back to the project, and that is through donations. At Joomla! Day events, I am often asked about donations. People want to know how they can donate, how much annual donations are given, and what the project does with the donations. That's an easy question; the core team members get paid from all the donations...

Of course I am kidding. If you take a look at the amount of money donated, and the number of core team/OSM members we could surely not have a decent living .

Most people are surprised to learn that donations are so small. The total amount of donations over the past 12 months was around $13.500. These donations come from community members who build Joomla! Web sites and use the donations link. The project also receives donations from companies like PackT, GoDaddy, and Google. Such corporate contributions come from the Google Summer of Code program, the generosity of a Web host, and royalties shared from Joomla! book sales.

It is of interest where donations come from. The top six countries are presented in this graph, and we see that the United States and The Netherlands are by far the top donating countries. In fact, these two countries are responsible for a total of 65% of all donations we receive!

In my recent blog entry "It's been awhile" I mentioned the need to lower the barriers for people to contribute. The ideas for lowering these barriers have come from feedback of people we work with and evaluation of how things are working. Managing a project like Joomla! that has grown so quickly means we need to balance between organizational structure and anarchy. Anarchy would mean that we open up everything within the project and have no controls in place, at all. The positive side of this approach is that everyone who wants to do something can actually do it. The downside would be that there would be very little predictability.

During the past weeks we have been discussing the PHP, MySQL and legacy requirements for future versions of Joomla! We already decided to move to MySQL 4.1+ for Jooma! 1.6. However, the question remained as to when we drop PHP 4 and 1.0 legacy support. After much discussion and research we've made some decisions regarding these final two items.

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!