(Cross posting of Joomla Community Blog)

The next Joomla Roadmap Meeting is being held as part of the J and Beyond conference that is taking place May 18-20 in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Ideally, we'd like to come out of the meeting with some tangible accomplishments, but we recognize that may not be possible given the time constraints. More important is to bring people together to bounce ideas around and to form groups that will work to bring particular features into Joomla.

To encourage features to be brought forward in a timely and organised process we would like to see those people with an interest in promoting a major feature or change get together in a team under the Production Working Groups banner.

Production Working Groups are the means of organizing and coordinating the work being done on Joomla. Some of the working groups are ongoing groups such as the Joomla Bug Squad, the Documentation group and the Translations group. Others are concerned with specific features. Work on major features for 3.x should be done in a working group.

Each working group provides a rallying point for those who want to work on that feature, whether they be coders, documentors, translators, UX specialists or whatever. Each group will have a PLT liaison assigned, so that the PLT can be kept informed on progress and the readiness state of the work as well as being able to coordinate different teams and give feedback on requirements such as backwards-compatibility, documentation, localisation and so on.

If a particular Working Group has been set up prior to J and Beyond, this will be an opportunity for those in the group to meet face-to-face, discuss aspects of their work together and ideally make progress towards their goals.

All working groups will have the opportunity to give a 4-minute lightning talk to describe what they are about, to drum up some enthusiasm and maybe recruit new volunteers, and for those more established groups to talk about the work they have done. But even if there is no working group, if you are interested in giving a talk, please give us a summary of what you want to talk about. (You can do that when you fill out the form mentioned in the next paragraph.)

If you are interested in helping with a feature for Joomla 3.x, whether or not you can come to the Joomla Roadmap Meeting at J and Beyond, please fill out the Joomla Roadmap Meeting: Production Working Group form and let us know.

Some Proposed or Existing Production Working Groups:

Update & Migration Working Group

Dealing with updates and migration should be a part of every Working Group that makes changes that break backward compatibility, but we need a group that can make sure that the software and tools are ready to migrate from 2.5 to 3.x. as seamlessly as possible.

Multi-Site Working Group

This is an important feature that was extensively discussed at the last roadmap. It’s consistently one of the most requested features.

Unified Content Model (UCM) Working Group

UCM is powerful new tool that is proposed for inclusion in the Platform. How exactly will it be implemented in the platform, what use will the CMS make of it, what are the backward compatiblity issues involved, what new coding would be needed to use it in the CMS, and what are the implications for third party extensions are all open questions. Pulling something like this into the CMS is a big job.

Search Working Group

Now that Finder has been integrated as Smart Search in 2.5, it’s time for a new Working Group dedicated to search capabilities.

Message Queue Working Group

Introduce a Platform API to act as a wrapper for various message queue packages as well as a native PHP implementation for those sites that don't or can't install third-party message queue software.  In addition to a native PHP message queue, we'd be looking at supporting at least the following: ZeroMQ, AMQP, IBM Websphere MQ.  We might even be able to get Microsoft, IBM, etc on board with helping us out.  This would make it easier to develop scalable web applications and might, for example, help with search indexing on large sites.

Data Handling Working Group

The idea is to develop a library of data handling classes and methods to make it easier to write code that can read, write and transform data from all kinds of resources, via all kinds of transports and output it to all kinds of destinations.

Web Services Working Group

For instance, a REST API for Joomla that is standardised, extendable and documented.

XML Validation Working Group

Let’s finally actually get DTD's and possibly Schemas written for all the XML used in Joomla so that tools such as Eclipse can automatically validate it.  Another goal would be to get it integrated into our continuous integration server as well.

Calendar Working Group

Create a proper calendar class that would allow Joomla to support multiple calendars (across multiple languages).

JavaScript Working Group

JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks are very prevalent in extensions and templates. Currently this leads to multiple copies and versions of frameworks being loaded which results in conflicts and performance issues. There have been different solutions proposed.

Unit Tests for the CMS

The Platform has done a great job adding unit test coverage for their code. We need to do the same kind of job for the CMS.

Performance Group

Find and refactor areas where the performance is not optimal.

Internet of Things

This existing working group is looking into using the Joomla Platform to simplify and open source the "internet of things". Using several popular input/output devices to allow the world to connect to the internet and back to the world; for the device's data to be easily displayed on Joomla sites and Joomla sites to "talk back" to the environment.

User Experience Working Goup

The User Experience Working Group is an existing standing team focused on the Joomla User Experience. This includes the Joomla administrator user interface, sample templates, sample data and any other related aspects.

Use the Joomla Roadmap Meeting form to give your feedback and tell us of your interest.