Following are the meeting notes from the Production Leadership Team meeting held on Monday 01/06/2015 and Tuesday 02/06/2015.
Meeting Details
Team Members: Jessica, Javier, Chris, Robert, Viktor, Roland, George, Marco, Tessa (N.B. Tessa was sent to JAB on a CLT budget to attend JED meetings - she attended for ~1 hour on both days).
Apologies: Tom, Thomas
Monday 01/06/2015
All team members wrote up a list of issues that they felt needed to be discussed over the weekend. All team members then voted on the list of issues and the 4 highest voted issues were:
- Mission & Vision
- PLT Organisation
- Joomla 4 & Releases
- Code Sprints
Team Culture
Everyone discussed what they thought and felt about the PLT overall. We agreed we are not focused on Joomla the CMS and getting releases out quickly. Our Job as PLT is to be responsible for coordinating the production of Joomla code, documentation, and localisation.
Mission & Vision
The primary focus of the day was to work on their vision statement and mission statement. We agree it needs to be revisited
Ideas were discussed about the mission and vision that the Joomla project represents. This was first defined by OSM and the Core Team and exists at http://opensourcematters.org/about/organization/mission-vision-and-values.html / https://www.joomla.org/about-joomla/the-project/mission-vision-and-values.html. The broad terms were still considered to be accurate by the PLT (although some of the notes about planning on releasing a framework need to be updated). It was considered by the PLT that adding CMS and Framework specific mission and visions might be useful, either as separate vision statements or as generic vision statement with differing tagline. Ideas were brought up including the words “content” and “interface” but definitions need to be finetuned to avoid misinterpretation.
This will be returned to at a later date
PLT Organisation
The team then reviewed the responsibilities document reassigning people where appropriate. We agreed that several teams were lacking members and will subsequently chase up on this. Jess will send out some emails where appropriate to chase up on some teams. Marco will be the liaison for certifications. Robert will be the PHP Fig Rep. Google is new, Jess and Marco will be liaison with Google collaboration. Tessa will be helping organize speaking events for the entire team.
The team members also talked about the benefits of “tutoring” our developers. A suggestion was made to have a video tutorial series. Largely this will be for Joomla 4 but some will be aimed at Joomla 3 & 4. George will be in charge of getting scripts together for these tutorials and Jess will be in charge of coordinating the videos with marketing.
The team members agreed to use the Glip tasks as the ultimate list of actionable items (however titles of items will still be published on the volunteer portal in the interest of transparency). However they agreed to publish more things on the public PLT list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/joomla-wg-production) that are currently dealt with in private emails.
Releases
The team members then discussed Joomla 3.5. They decided that to speed up the release of bugs we would release 3.4.2 out with all the currently merged fixes. We will target an RC June 12th with a Final ~22nd June (depending on bugs reported) giving 2 weekends for volunteers to look at the data and a full working week. We will add the SQL fixes and the pagination fixes.
Joomla 3.5 will be target for the 1st week of September. It will include the plugin Don wrote to get statistics on PHP, Database Versions, Joomla Versions and OS Systems. We will make enquires on a lead for this (Radek has expressed provisional interest). This will include this basic data as an opt out feature. We will also investigate having an optional further set of data that can be reported as an opt-in inside the plugin.
Weblinks will be released as soon as possible, however this relies on George, Jess and Mike discussing the workflow for releasing core supported extensions.
The team members agreed to investigate having a release leader responsible for Core Supported Extensions.
Roland, Robert and Javier will also look at making a Phing or Gulp script to automate more of the release process for Joomla.
Tuesday 02/06/2015
The team members started by discussing the sprints. A provisional list of sprints was drafted:
- Architecture Sprint (Chris)
- Joomla 4 Features (Marco)
- HMVC (George)
- Web Services (Chris)
- Unit & System Tests (Viktor)
- Framework v2 (George)
- JLayouts/Rendering Engine (depending on whether Roberto submits any further Pull Requests) (Javier)
- Tracker (Bug Sprint) (Roland)
Joomla 4
The team members then went on to discuss Joomla 4. The group’s work who sat down at the “Make It Happen” session at JAB was presented and it was suggested that a formal working group be created around the ideas presented. Issues were raised about whether the group should be explicitly named as such because of potential negative connotations with the community. It was also raised that several of the proposed features could be placed in 3.x. It was agreed that 3.5 and 3.6 would be the priority releases and the work done by this group would be largely kept in a private repository to encourage the focus to be on those releases.
It was also discussed how the proposed Joomla 4 team would interact with the Release Team proposal under discussion. It was raised that there could be issues with the release team controlling Joomla 4 features during the building of the features. It was agreed that the Joomla 4 team would have control over the process until the first public alpha when the code would be handed over to the Joomla 4 Release Team (although it was noted that it was likely the 4.0 Release Team and Joomla 4 Working Group would likely be comprised of the same people in reality).
It was agreed that 3.x development will continue. SemVer allows us to keep adding (and backporting) features unlike the 2.5 LTS release. The team members also recognise the B/C pledge meaning 3.x is guaranteed for at least 2 years after the last minor release meaning 3.x will not drop off for a long time.
The team members decided to go on and continue speaking about the 3.x series before concluding with the Joomla 4 proposals.
The team discussed JoomlaCode. Roland will lead a code sprint to deal with the language packages (the only CMS downloads left to be ported to the new download site). It was agreed not to port the CMS releases until after this code sprint
Tessa will also set up a developer evangelist working group. We discussed follow up post events to increase transparency. We will contact the CLT to discuss this before a formal announcement of the team.
Marco will start to document a formal feature contribution workflow to give developers more confidence in new features being accepted into core. Contacting david h. who is presumed to have started this process.
The PLT went on to discuss the removal of core supported extensions. There are 2 existing PR’s for component removal in 3.5 - banners and messages. Issues were raised about how marketing and release teams would deal with having to release half a dozen extensions and the CMS in a worse case scenario as there are little plans in place. It was also raised that there were also little provision in place for setting up distributions and a new method of sample data. It was therefore agreed that we will remove com_messages but leave com_banners in the CMS while the PLT deals with the issues mentioned.
To deal with the above issues a Joomla 3 Installation Working Group will be set up to discuss improving the Joomla 3 installer (as mentioned above Joomla 3 will still exist for a long time and therefore it’s important that users first experience is positive). This group will also be looking to work out how installing extensions can be improved as we remove more extensions from core and how to deal with Sample Data.
Javier and Robert will also set up a Working Group to automate more of the release workflow. This could be based on either Phing or Gulp - whatever is chosen though should be used for all Joomla Core Supported extensions as well. This will look at packaging extensions and the CMS and generating said packages, automatically updating the version numbers and tagging the releases in git. It will also investigate new features such as automatically generating the files to be removed array using git.
The media manager from Buddhima was then discussed. It was recognised by all team members that this is a feature that is desired by all areas of the community (and was a feature also that was specified in the Joomla 4 Make it Happen session). As Web Services will be defining the new MVC layer (potentially in associating with the Joomla 4 Group) it was decided that the code was not in a position to merge using the com_config MVC and UCM (which is something the Joomla 4 group are looking to remove). As a result Buddhima will be contacted about rewriting the features he has written to use the legacy MVC and potentially removing the UCM dependency at the same time. Based on the keynote at JAB we will look at having basic image editing using HTML Canvas editing with a fallback on JImage (appropriate error handling will be needed for legacy browsers on servers with no GD support)
The PLT discussed the the plans for the install from web feature and decided to rewrite the plugin so that it communicates directly with the JED API. Some objections from the JED-Team where discussed with the JED Team and we agreed that we will go with the long term goal of direct communication. Robert will sit together with Rob Clayburn Wednesday morning to build a prototype for a new plugin.
The attendee’s as a result of these items looked to redraft the roadmap. Provisionally
3.5 - Nic’s update emails plugin
- Routing
- PHP/MySQL anonymous stats collection
- com_messages decoupling
3.6 - Remove unnecessary sample data
- Webservices
- New MVC
- Translator experience improvements
3.7 - Rework the 3.x installer
- New Media Manager
- Extension Decoupling
Outside of this the PLT will be interested to see any contributions in the following areas:
- SEO Plugins
- Admin Template with minimal options
which when ready could be shipped with the next available release. It was also agreed that if any other features which were considered mergeable were contributed then the roadmap could be adjusted as appropriate. Chris will formally write up these into the roadmap
The team members then looked forward to setting PLT goals and action items for 2016. Many of the goals for 2015 would still be applicable on the high level however it was decided to add two new high level goals
- Improve transparency of the PLT
- We are opening https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/joomla-wg-production
- Improve diversity of the production process.
- Building a safe environment for all people to contribute to the project
UX Improvements
The team members then discussed the proposal from Crystal Harris to create a team to investigate about getting some funding from PLT for some serious 3rd party testing, ideally on a large scale. The results from that would give us a good idea of where our software is lacking, where we can improve, and possibly ideas for new features. . This would involve getting 3rd party testing on a large scale on our templates for User Experience. It was agreed by the PLT that this was a great idea overall and the PLT will go back to Crystal to get a formal tender to get a company or experienced volunteers involved (note this isn’t a paid role). It was agreed that this would likely be a subgroup of the Joomla 4 Working Group.
Joomla 4
Finally the Joomla 4 proposal was discussed. People felt that the features proposed satisfied a wide range of Joomla users (from developers to site admins). The Working Group was therefore sent to email vote for formation.