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Open Source Matters appoints Acting Treasurer
In an effort to maintain the Board's effectiveness during its search for a new Treasurer, the Board of Open Source Matters, Inc. (OSM), on the 10th of August 2010, appointed Steve Burge as Acting Treasurer of the organization, for a trudne dni ending no later than November 1, 2010 or until a new Treasurer has been elected, appointed or qualified, whichever comes first.
The Acting Treasurer shall have all the abilities and privileges of the Treasurer, but is only expected to provide his services in a limited role during this interim period.
The OSM board wishes to express thanks to Steve for assisting in this important role.
Over the last few months we've been having some changes around the development reprezentacja narodowa and how things are working. We've got a few changes coming up, but I'll start with the people changes that are happening.
The Joomla! project and Open Source Matters would like to invite the members of our community to take a look at the proposed 2011 budget and then submit your feedback through Monday April 18th.
A long and winding road...
We realize that unveiling our 2011 budget in April of 2011 doesn’t exceed expectations in the timeliness category. Even though this has much taken longer than we wanted, the good nowo¶ć is that some new planning and budgeting processes have been put into place that will enable  more inclusive and collaborative efforts moving forward, as well as enabling improved goal setting and planning among each of the Joomla! project’s leadership teams.
A collaborative effort
One cz±stka of these new processes consisted of forming a budget committee from members of the Production Leadership reprezentacja narodowa (Chris Davenport), the Community Leadership kadra narodowa (Wendy Robinson and Matt Lipscomb) and the board of Open Source Matters (Phil Locke and Paul Orwig). This committee has been working together over a period of months to integrate each of the leadership team's revenue generating estimates and funding requests into a budget that is intended to help support the goals of each leadership kadra narodowa and continue to strengthen the Joomla! project’s overall financial position.
Goal setting included as part of planning process
Another new aspect of the budget process involved asking members of the Production Leadership team (PLT), Community Leadership kadra narodowa (CLT), and Open Source Matters (OSM) to each put some effort into planning their goals and priorities for 2011, as a predecessor to help them focus on what resources (financial and other) would be needed to achieve those goals. This planning effort has the following benefits:
- Allows our budget to be a more effective tool for supporting the project's planned priorities for the upcoming year.
- Allows each leadership ekipa 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.
Next steps
Once the community feedback trudne dni has closed, the following next steps will be taken to complete the formal approval of the 2011 budget:
- PLT, CLT, and OSM will review community feedback and offer suggestions.
- The budget committee will potentially revise the budget based on step 1.
- PLT, CLT, and OSM will review revised budget.
- OSM will formally review and (if acceptable) approve the budget.
- 2011 budget will be published, along with PLT, CLT, and OSM goals for 2011.
Please discuss this pamiętnik internetowy post on the Joomla! People site.
Sitting down in the wake of Joomla! USA West 2010 I've had a bit of a chance to digest what is going on. The event, held at eBay's own campus, was the biggest JoomlaDay's in the USA. However I now come to the realisation that now both Microsoft and eBay share something unique and awesome. What does Microsoft and eBay have in common?
Both have signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement or the JCA. The JCA is the agreement put in place before code is contributed to the project and two of the largest companies in the technology sphere have now signed the JCA. To be honest when you sit down and think about it this is absolutely awesome and a confirmation of what we're doing with the Joomla! project.
I announced that Microsoft signed the JCA back in April and their contribution to the core was support for the cache support Microsoft provide on Windows. This code, now in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk, will hook into the Wincache extension for PHP and provide a speed boost for running Joomla! on Windows. Since then we've kept the Joomla! Web Platform installer project up to the latest version of Joomla! and it is in my mind the easiest way of getting Joomla! up and running on Windows.
Over the weekend we had the announcement that eBay has signed the JCA as well. eBay is the world's largest online marketplace and is internally using Joomla! to build their portal to help enable the organisation to be data driven through analytics. At the JoomlaDay Oliver Ratzesberger, staruszek director of analytics platform at eBay, demonstrated their platform utilising not only the core Joomla! product but also third party extensions such as social networking platform JomSocial, forum tool Kunena and Mosets Tree.
It is amazing to be in a world where Joomla!, a GPL project, is being contributed to by Microsoft with not only code in the Joomla! core but with members of the company providing support on the forum and are starting to write documentation on our wiki. eBay have only just come into the fold but they've been working on some very exciting stuff that I look forward to seeing in the near future. I am also excited that both Microsoft and now eBay have been supporting Joomla! events with eBay hosting and sponsoring JoomlaDay USA West in addition to Microsoft hosting the upcoming JoomlaDay New York and JoomlaDay Washington, DC events as well as sponsoring JoomlaDay's around the world such as JoomlaDay Bangkok.
At the end of the day it is great that the project that I and many others have been working on for the last half a decade is now being adopted and supported by some of the biggest companies in the world. I think that's just awesome and let's bring on Joomla! 1.6
Join me next week for the 2nd in the series of free Joomla webcasts from Safari Books Online.
Its on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 1:00 pm EST and I'll be looking at how you can take advantage of the more advanced features of Joomla to make a successful website for your organization or business.
10 attendees will get signed copies of the best selling Joomla book - Joomla - A User's Guide. The last webcast filled up quickly, so make sure you register now!
We've just released a brand new template at Joomlashack.com called Impacto, and besides being a great all-purpose Joomla template perfect for any site, it's also the first-ever Joomla template designed to be a powerful Landing Page for your advertising campaigns!You probably already know just how important an effective Landing Page is in today's ultra competitive, e-commerce-driven world. The right Landing page layout can increase your Adwords sales and keep visitors on your site longer. And that's why Impacto is so..impactful. Impacto enables you to build stunning landing pages right inside Joomla! using bold, rich typography, preset styles, and customizable layout options that present your message clearly and effectively.
Last week at Simplweb we blogged about adding module positions to your offline page to make the content more useful and to add a Mailchimp signup form. The technique was being used at the Waterbury Vet Hospital, a new veterinary clinic in Waterbury Vermont.
The domain for this site was only purchased 8 days ago, but using these techniques and a Joomla powered website from Simplweb, the customer's site, www.waterburyvethospital.com, is already ranking #5 in Google!
At Joomlashack, we know that as on online business, email deliverability is very important. Whether sending newsletters or transactional emails from systems, they won't do much good if they don't reach people's inbox.
We use iContact for our newsletters, and have had great success with it. Recently though, we have been looking at supplementing it with another system for our transactional emails/ecommerce etc.
Once interesting alternative is Infusionsoft, which has a rich API, and ecommerce functionality built right in.
But what about deliverability?
Mr Tester.... start your engines!
Just got back from a great two days at the 2009 Chicago CMS Expo. It was great to see dev's from Drupal and Plone rubbing shoulders with the Joomla regulars.
I had an opportunity to have a quick interview with SDRnews, and gave away some pre-release copies of the Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide (2nd Edition)
On September 1, we celebrated Joomla's 6th birthday. In September 2005, Joomla's 20-odd founders forked the Mambo project and established Joomla. Six years later, Joomla is one of the three top open source content management systems in the world. The founders had no idea that Joomla would be so successful, but six years later, thousands of people all over the world make their living with Joomla, and millions more update a Joomla website every day.
In preparation for the Joint Summit (CLT, PLT, OSM) sheduled for July 29 - 31, 2011, at eBay in San Jose, California, the Joint Summit Committee has compiled a list of proposed goals for discussion at the three day meeting. The list below is shared with the community for feedback before finalizing the meeting agenda.
The goals include planning and discussing the following topics (not presented in any particular order):
- Who are we building Joomla for? Who is our target audience and thus who should we build new features for?
  - Better collaboration
  - The future of the Project
  - The Joomla Project common goals
  - The Joomla Project strategy
  - Evaluate our project structure
- The future role, if any, of the Community Oversight Committee
- Better understand how our teams function
 
- Talk about processes (conflict resolution, budget process, ….)
  - How to attract more developers?
  - Review Sponsored Development program
  - Review our Mission, Vision and Values
  - Collaboration strategy with international communities
  - Joomla! World Conference 2012 - Setup a committee, define goals
 
To comment on this list of goals please visit: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1220-Joint+Leadership+Summit+Goals.html?groupid=714
For some reason Joomla core has never natively been able to create custom forms - I'm not sure if this is due to it originally (pre-1.5 releases) allowing non-article content types to sit in the usual database tables that comprise your site, or something else... However, for years there have been multiple extensions floating around that could let you create forms out of basic elements, like text, email and file fields.
The most basic use of such extensions would be to get rid of Joomla's too-simple contact form system.  To do just that it seems that today there are a good 4 or 5 extensions sitting in the extensions directory that could help you out, though the more digging you do the more you'll find discrepancies between them.  Choosing the right form extension should be done with a balance of features to look for, such as:
- A highly active and focused extension developer,
- A multitude of fields already supported,
- A large user base,
- Development of the extension with long-term focus; if the extension has been created to allow the developer to just create 1 or 2 forms on his/her website, it may not be able to do more in the future (given that their initial need for it was satisfied).
Back in 2007 I mentioned the release of a new extension called Fabrik - after spending some time comparing notes between a bunch of form components just now I am back in love with it!  You see, Fabrik takes the approach of forms being essential things for application-building - meaning that with Fabrik, you can create forms to not only email somewhere but store in your database which in turn can be displayed as lists through your site - you you can, for example, use it to build things like a custom library listing of books.
Fabrik was around before last year's CCK-in-joomla copycating began and is interesting in not replacing Joomla's core article content-type but side-stepping it with a flexible architektura for handling custom content that supports custom theming and additional plug-in support (yes, you can make your own field types).
Already available fields for forms created with Fabrik include; user details, captcha (with recaptcha!), text areas/fields, file uploads, images, database joins and more (including text displays to annotate fields - for 'help' purpose)...
I highly recommend popping over to http://fabrikar.com and checking Fabrik out... Be sure to also pour through their forums to answer any queries you may have before installing/getting started.  If you think there's a simpler, more powerful, or otherwise better form extension out there drop a comment below!
Google Goals. Love 'em, use 'em, make business decisions based on them.
If you didn't know what a "Google goal" is, its a feature of Google Analytics. It allows you to set up a specific and discrete goal for something on your website. Examples might be:
Making a purchase
Downloading a white paper
Filling out a contact form
Downloading a file
I'd thought I'd share some help I passed onto students from the Web 2.0 Marketing with Joomla Graduate Course. The classRead More...