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A question for the Joomla community - Why Joomla?

I've been posting sporadically to this blog for some time now, and we've been lucky to attract a few thousand people per month.  I generally advocate that a site's success doesn't solely reside in Google Analytics but instead, mainly in the feel of community participation it relays to people when they spend time on it.   In that respect, things are going well here - you guys post comments here and there fairly regularly and old threads are always being picked up for debate.

When I launched the blog I sought to answer its title question through the anecdotes and ponderings I was going to post to it.  Though, in the past few months - with Joomla 1.5 being released and a whole stack of new extensions being released for it, I'm still curious to hear why you - the Joomla community at large, choose to use it as your platform of choice for building websites.

So - please feel free to be as candid as you'd like, post a comment below to answer the simple question...

... Why Joomla ? 

If you have read this pamiętnik internetowy for a Longer okres of time (or have gone through the Sitemap..:-)) you might have read about the DS Syndication Component in my post Overcoming the Joomla RSS Feed rafa Well, there is a new version of this component since August of this year and I must say it [...]

Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com

So I have been updating my Joomla book website, I discovered a komplikacja with my RSS. Ironically, I discuss exactly NOT doing what I did in the book, but do as I say, not what I do (or something).I wanted to redesign my home page. Right now its a category blog - an obvious choice for book nius - and then fixed content in the category description. I wanted to change because it's difficult to manage the meta description in Joomla in this layout, so I wanted to change it to a uncategorized article, and then load { loadposition } to show nowość links.
This new project will bring some blogposts that will suite as a Case Study for building a Search Engine Optimized website with Joomla 1.5.x or any other CMS as well...

Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com

Joomlashack is excited to announce the release of Scribe for Joomla. Scribe is an SEO service that analyzes your content and tells you how you can make it better for search engines and get ranked higher. When you install the free Scribe for Joomla extension, you can analyze your articles to improve their SEO copywriting - with the click of a button. The analysis shows you what search engines think your article is about, and then suggests and guides you to make it better. Its like having an SEO copywriting expert standing by your shoulder, helps you optimize your content faster and easier. Its not a tool to tweak SEF url's, its a powerful editorial assistant to help you write better copy for search engines! Be sure to read the latest proposal for Joomla's leadership structure and give them comments and feedback for what's being planned. (You may need to join the Leadership Group at the Joomla People site in medal to provide that feedback.) This is important, because Joomla's leadership and direction impacts your business, particularly if you are making money building Joomla websites for clients. Joomla ships with a default baner tool so you can run 3rd impreza ads on your site. It's ok, but one desperately needed feature is some automation in the management. Fortunately, there are some 3rd impreza solutions and one of the best is Ad Agency from iJoomla, winning the best commerce extension this year at CMS Expo.

Its been a while since we have been able to post new tutorials here at compassdesigns.net. I have been hard at work on the 2nd edition of my book and the accompanying video.

But I am excited to say that I managed to convince David Towers from Good Web Practices to take some time and contribute one for us:

How to Optimize Images in Joomla 1.5

Check out the tutorial, there are some great tricks and tips how to unlock your images for SEO

David Towers is an SEO Manage [...]

Head over to Copyblogger and you can grab a free 28 page report on SEO copyrighting. A great follow up to my post last week about our new Joomla SEO extension!

IITEmpoweringHaiti.org is a Non-Profit website powered by Joomla that showcases the work of a reprezentacja narodowa of undergraduates from the Illinois Institute of Technology who are working to improve the primary educational situation in Haiti, by helping support the implementation of the One notebook per Child (OLPC) Program.

IITEmpoweringHaiti.org chose Simplweb Joomla hosting as a home for their non-profit website.

They have designed a laptop solar power solution for Haiti schools to provide power for the XO laptops, schools and net connectivity. Their larger goals are to foster collaboration between partners in the US and in Haiti and to create a sustainable, replicable, open-source energy solution that will enable the children to use their XO laptops freely

Want to sharpen your Web 2.0 marketing skills and learn some Joomla at the same time?

This spring I am co-teaching a 3 credit 15 week graduate course at Marlboro College Graduate Center with Jen McKibben (of New England User group fame).

The blurb reads:

"This course explores the power and practice of Web 2.0 marketing.
Including and going well beyond the simple "how to" of integrating
social networking sites into your campaign, this course challenges [...]

As you may know the Joomla leadership teams have been working hard to increase our transparency and open our disussions and decision processes. We hope we're moving in the right direction and you as a community sent a lot of constructive feedback from the "Better Communication With the Joomla Community" pamiętnik internetowy post.

Today we announce the "Ask the Joomla Team" communication channel.

What is Ask the Joomla Team?

The propozycja is that for one hour every week, two leadership team members will be available to answer your questions.

The session will be in a chat format. You can ask any question you like. We can not promise that the team members can answer every question but we will give our best and if we can't give an answer directly we will try to get the information and answer the question later.

We will ograniczenie the session to one hour and we myśl one session per week. The sessions will be held on Wednesdays but at different times of the day, so that people from all over the world have the chance to join.

Here are the dates, times and community volunteers for the first three weeks:

• April 14th, 20 UTC: Mark Dexter, Robert Deutz
• April 21st, 4 UTC: Brad Baker, Louis Landry
• April 28th, 12 UTC: Alex Kempkens, Louis Landry

How Can You Join Ask the Joomla Team

You can meet us in the #joomla-ask-the-team czat room on irc.freenode.net

If you're not sure about how to join an IRC chat, Freenode has a detailed FAQ section: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml

One very easy way to join is to visit this link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#joomla-ask-the-team

If you've been following the developments lists (or even if you haven't), you've noticed a flurry of activity around Joomla 1.6 in recent months. While we haven't been very good about keeping our milestones, there are a few very good reasons for that.

The first and biggest reason is we've been trying to shoot at a moving target. The scope for Joomla 1.6 was pretty basic—adding ACL and nested categories. Had we stopped there, we could have theoretically had Joomla 1.6 out by now. But while working on it, we and others in the community have been constantly saying to ourselves "wouldn't it be really friggin' cool if Joomla had...?" This kind of scope creep happens all the time in the real world, and there's a propensity to go overboard when our hands aren't forced on a specific deadline. There's always that "one last thing" we can squeeze in.

Secondly, it's the fallacy that "this will only take a few minutes to implement." Many developers (and not just developers) often fall victim to the notion that a task will be short, only to discover that it's more complex under the surface than initially thought. Minutes quickly turn into days or even weeks. It's human nature.

Third of all, there's a feeling that if something doesn't go in now, it won't go into the Joomla core for years to come. We have a pretty progressive roadmap for the next versions of Joomla and we'll try to keep a regular pace of development. Since Joomla progress is primarily determined by its contributors, the pace will be commensurate with such. So while this isn't true, some have the feeling it is.

In the past, we've had some false starts and sometimes been unclear about direction or needs, but we hope to be better at it. The Joomla Project has taken a lot of criticism during it's relatively short existence, which, deserved or not, comes with the territory. But, all in all, we're all working towards a common goal of making the next version of Joomla as powerful, extensible, and compatible as it can be.

If you work with Joomla, you know full well that the community is pretty vocal about the things they like and don't like. Joomla events are prime occasions where we receive feedback on what's working for people and what isn't. There may not always be an answer to every issue, but we do listen.

Essentially, the process of working on Joomla 1.6 is where all of this activity comes together—all those emails, arena discussions, Joomla Days, and other random "ingredients" of information go into a giant bubbling cauldron and soon becomes (hopefully) the tastiest soup you've ever eaten. Decisions are made based on what ingredients we can combine and recommending against others that won't taste good (or even spoil the stew). All is done with a keen eye on the quality of the end-product—it has to look good and taste good.

At this time, the bubbling cauldron of Joomla 1.6 is getting near time for us all to get our first good taste. We've added the ACL, nested categories work, a new Article Manager is written, new core libraries like JForm have been added, and we're working on fresh new templates for both the front-end and the back-end. We're also working on a way to make upgrading from Joomla 1.5 as painless as possible. So, in odznaczenie to get a round of solid feedback from the community, we're looking to release a second Alpha very soon and follow up with a quick Beta after that.

So please be patient.

As a new element of the planning and budget process, each Joomla! leadership kadra narodowa (Production Leadership Team, Community Leadership Team, and Open Source Matters) has set major goals for 2011. This goal setting effort has the following benefits:

• Allows our project’s budget to be a more effective tool for supporting the project's planned priorities for the upcoming year.
• Allows each leadership team to better understand what the other leadership teams are planning to work on, which will improve inter-team collaboration and support.
• Allows the community to be aware of goals and priorities for the upcoming year, which will improve transparency and openness and enable increased support and volunteer contributions.
• Will make it easier to bring in more sponsorship contributions, due to prospective sponsors having a better understanding about what initiatives their contributions will be supporting.

The major 2011 goals for each Joomla! leadership ekipa are listed below. The goals are all numbered for reference purposes (but not as an indication of priority). A bullet list of some tasks that are planned to be worked on in support of these goals during the course of the year are listed below each goal.

The Joomla! project is also pleased to publish its final 2011 budget.

2011 Production Leadership reprezentacja narodowa goals

PLT Goal #1: Develop four iterations of the Joomla Platform project.

• Develop Joomla Platform 11.1. Target release date is 10 April 2011.
• Develop Joomla Platform 11.2. Target release date is 10 July 2011.
• Develop Joomla Platform 11.3. Target release date is 10 October 2011.
• Develop Joomla Platform 11.4. Target release date is 10 January 2012.

PLT Goal #2: Develop two iterations of the Joomla CMS project

• Develop "Bowerbird". Target release date is 10 July 2011.
• Complete development of com_localise component.
• Complete development of Joomla-MediaWiki importer to support localised documentation.
• Develop the next CMS release. Target release date is 10 January 2012.

PLT Goal #3: Release updates to the current LTS release (Joomla 1.5) as required

• Releases to be made until 3 months after GA of the next LTS. Number, timing and nature of these releases will depend on circumstances.

PLT Goal #4: Outreach and promotion of Joomla to a technical audience.

• Promotion of Joomla at technical conferences and events, particularly in respect of the Joomla Platform.
• Outreach to new developers under a Joomla scholar Outreach program (JSOP).

2011 Community Leadership Team goals

CLT Goal #1: Communication/Interaction with the Community

• More consistency in meetings and publishing of meeting notes/minutes
• Increase CLT membership to ease individual workload as well as broaden representation within leadership and public facing (the community) Task: Assign a member to join the communications team with OSM and PLT
• Volunteer forms for each area of the CWG (JRD, JED, People, JCM, Forum)
• Volunteer recognition program: rewards, public mentions, badges
• More updates to the CWG channels (google group, people site, blogs) about things happening within the working group

CLT Goal #2: Joomla.org site maintenance, usability, effectiveness and improvements

• New joomla.org family site design: volunteer committee run design
• Phased upgrade to 1.6 (and beyond)
• Enhanced Directory Listings
• Single sign on/auto sign on
• Evaluate possible forum software alternatives such as Kunena
• Integrate User notes for directory and people sites
• Website upkeep - eg. security, third party upgrades, recovery in the event of compromise

CLT Goal #3: Active participation in live events

• Have more CWG attendance at Joomla events (team members)
• More representation of CWG leadership at events
• Joint Leadership Summit
• Video and live steaming of events

2011 Open Source Matters Goals

OSM Goal #1: Increase revenue from sponsorships, shop, and website monetization opportunities

• a) Switch the shop over to spreadshirt.com b) create new souvenirs (key ring , Mug, etc...)
• Brainstorm & update donator opportunities/pages
• Increase publicity of new sponsors and sponsor opportunities
• Increase Google Ads revenue using prime locations
• Brainstorm & implement Joomla hosting page
• Try to add international reprezentacja narodowa members to improve international sponsors.

OSM Goal #2: Solidify/stabilize the Trademark team

• Confirm (Acting) Trademark kadra narodowa leader
• Document Trademark-application processes
• Document and simplify Trademark rules
• Recruit new Trademark team members & involve more board members
• Implement new Ticketing software to better manage submissions and communications
• Use ProjectFork software to manage above internal tasks
• Clarify Trademark priorities
• Try to add international team members to translate process documents and follow up with international issues.

OSM Goal #3: Establish Joomla supporters club

• Brainstorm details
• Create requirements
• Fix firm dates for going live
• Confirm who is going to develop & costs
• Ongoing publicity & monthly promotions
• Ask for help to translate information to different languages.

OSM Goal #4: Simplification and documentation of our processes

• Document Treasurer responsibilities and processes (for normal duties as well as project-wide processes such as budget/planning, funding requests, and contractor engagements), and add to the Wiki
• Document processes for Events and add to the Wiki
• Document trademark processes and add to Wiki
• Organizing of OSM organizational documents
• Document travel process for leadership team members (Orbitz, etc.)
• Identify repository for international documentation.

OSM Goal #5: Improve support for Joomla events

• Build an events team
• Finding a long run strategy for events
• Defining the target groups for different event types
• Establish Joomla world conference
• Documentation sprints and developer conferences
• Create translations for documentation.

OSM Goal #6: Improve PR/Promotion efforts to raise positive global awareness about value of Joomla

• Raise awareness of Sponsorships
• Publicise Supporters Club
• Translate documents.

Please discuss this pamiętnik internetowy here.

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[...] Have you heard this latest nowina in and around the world of Joomla? New releases, cool events, World Usability Day, and much more in this edition!