In line with the CMS Roadmap, a new working group has been formed to look at the potential for distributing the Joomla CMS in different distributions (rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach). All information, discussions and information can be found at the new github.com/joomla-cms/start-here site. Everyone is welcome to participate.

This working group is taking a slightly different and new approach in terms of how it is being organised.

First of all, the central hub of activity a new GitHub organisation, joomla-cms, and a new command-centre repository start-here. The idea behind this repository is that all information, discussions, task lists, and so on, is in one, central place. The hope is this will make it easier for people to participate and engage without having to search many different locations or lengthy mailing list threads.

The hub of this working group is the GitHub issues list. In the start-here repository, this is the nerve centre for discussions and tasks that impact the overall goal - things like how will the CMS be split up, how will we put it back together, how will versioning work, and so on. As work progresses, Github labels will be used to categories different types of issues so everyone can easily see what might be an active discussion about a decision that needs to be made, or tasks that need to be performed.

Issues can also be collected into milestones. This can be used to automatically provide a roadmap and a reliable measure of where the project is at - is it very near or very far from completing any particular phase of the work?

As the details of how the CMS will be broken up are worked out, the new joomla-cms organisation will form the hub of new code repositories for well defined packages. This might include a Core package, an Articles package and so on. Each package could have its own team that works on it, and it would also have its own issues list to help with self-management.

As the number of packages grow, the CMS will need to rely more and more on the new Joomla Issue Tracker to triage bug reports and send them to the right place.

So who can be involved? Well, anyone can be because many different skill sets are needed - engineering, design, marketing, testing, writers, and much, much more.

If you are interested in becoming a part of this working group, which really just means getting involved, please visit start-here and join, or just watch the conversations.