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20% Off iJoomla for Halloween

Need great extensions like AdAgency or DigiStore?

iJoomla has a Halloween sale of 25% off. This offer turns into a pumpkin Tuesday,  November 2nd at midnight!

If you haven't seen it yet, Joomlashack has a March basketball inspired 15% off everything sale this Wednesday through Friday.

The magic code is "mad15" - use it to grab their new templates or their great new Picnik Editor for Joomla that lets you edit images right in Joomla's backend.

Want to know how to do something in Joomla?

This summer I am starting a new project - a "Tutorial Request" program. Each week I'll be tackling an issue that trips Joomla users up and writing a detailed tutorial how to solve it.

The Production Leadership team (PLT) is the group of people that is responsible for keeping the machinery that produces the Joomla software maintained and in good working order.  The PLT aims to meet in person once or twice a year.  The last development related summit was held in Australia in January of 2009 and this meeting was pivotal for bringing in necessary changes to the organisational and communication structure of the Joomla production system, lowering the barriers to entry for contribution significantly.

The next PLT Summit will be held around the Joomla Day West in San Jose in October this year.  Prime focus will be given to establishing the policy and process we need to revise in odznaczenie to make Joomla 1.7, and all future versions, happen in a more timely and efficient manner, and allow for innovation to be incorporated at a pace that keeps up with the dynamic flow of the part of the sieć in which we reside. To help us idea for this summit, we'd like your suggestions for what you think might be important for us to talk about.  We only have two or three days together so we can't cover everything, but we'd like to know what's on your mind all the same whether you are a user, a developer, a designer or a site administrator.  If you have a suggestion, please post them using this form.

Finally, we must thanks the sponsors for this event which have offset the major costs that would otherwise have been bourn by PLT members personally.  Thanks go to eBay, Microsoft and Kontent Design for allowing us to make this event possible.

If you are a heavy user of Jomsocial, you can get their $350 developer license for only $299 until Friday 26th August. Upgrade to Unlimited Developer Access and use JomSocial on any sites and receive UNLIMITED support for all your sites.

I just came across a simple example of how Joomla's extensibility can offer brochure websites powerful integration with 3rd prywatka services; USA Bookseller Barnes & Noble has used Joomla to create a website for developers to learn about their eBook reader, called a Nook.

The site's content is mainy public and offered through Joomla's de facto Article setup though it looks like they've used Community Builder to allow developers on the site to annotate their user accounts with marketing-useful information upon registration.  As well, the site shares a login with Zen Desk, a popular 3rd-party customer support/ticketing provider - so once logged in, Nook Developers can jump right into reading and posting any support queries hosted on the B&N Zen Desk account.

To integrate user login with Zen Desk, B&N may have used the Zen Desk Dropbox bridge plugin - I'm not sure...

Joomla 1.6.0 (stable) has now been released! Congratulations to all the people who hard worked hard on this major release.

Embedding videos in Joomla content can be a little tricky sometimes; with a stock Joomla site you really just have one main content area to bung embed code into, but you usually have a wysiwyg editor installed so that code gets messed up in html translation mistakenly or otherwise doesn't display whilst editing your content etc...  Of course, to make the job easier, extensions have emerged as plugins that let you use special tags in your content (such as Allvideos), but well, who wants to remember how to properly reference a 3rd-party hosted clip right?

I've been excited about Kaltura for some time - its an Open-source video platform which works just like some of the major commercial ones (eg. Brightcove.) - only its cheaper (free?) and has some cool tools to let your community remix videos right in your website - using a huge assortment of samples; from your collection to anything hosted on Kaltura member sites.

Kaltura just released an extension for Joomla and it looks pretty amazing; with it, you can:

• upload/embed videos,
• embed flickr/myspace video/photo/audio czwarta władza in your articles,
• manage publikatory in a central control panel,
• customize the embed player on your site,
• edit and remix video to embed in your site and much more!

Now, Kaltura still doesn't solve the issue of embedding content from 3rd bibka hosts like youtube, vimeo, etc..; it seems to offer myspace video embeds (ahem, what?) and thats about it.. so you're still going to have to use somethign like the Allvideos plugin to easily embed them, but Kaltura can be a very easy way to upload and embed original video - you can upload video files or record directly from your webcam...

Joomla 2.5 is due out in January, which is the culmination of the 1.6/1.7/2.5 series. Now is the time to be mapping out those things we want to accomplish in the next series, which will culminate in the 3.5 release in July 2013.

At the recent joint summit we discussed the process for establishing goals and milestones for the long-term Joomla releases. We want more seats at the table for the technical discussions on how to move things forward. Once every six months the PLT and developers will meet just before or after an existing event to work on the roadmap.

Our first Roadmap Meeting will be on Friday, October 21, 2011 in New York City, the day before Joomla! Day NYC 2011. This is a working session that is open to anyone interested in working on designing or creating features for the next major release of Joomla. Our goal is to come out of this meeting with working documents for implementing different features.

There is no cost to attend the event but you must register in advance. Not everyone with an interest in working on this will be able to attend in person so we are exploring options for including virtual attendees.

We encourage everyone to have a voice and to vote or add ideas to the inicjatywa Pool at ideas.joomla.org.

For details, see the posting in News at the Developer site.

Comments are welcome and can be shared in at the JPeople site in this thread

Community Leadership team Summit - 28th July and August 1st,  2011

Participants: Peter Martin, Wendy Robinson, Sandra Warren, Paul Orwig (Day 1)

Video participants: Matt Lipscomb, Brad Baker

The following is a summary of the topics discussed in the Community Leadership ekipa (CLT) Summit:

A. All current websites that are under overview of the CLT:

1. Joomla.org now has about 30 internationalized pages that are used to redirect non-English people to local Joomla community resources. However because of the new Joomla 1.7 banner, the localized hiperłącze is currently unavailable.

• Action item 1: reinsert the łącze to localized “Joomla Information Pages”.
• Action item 2: get the “info pages” translated in more languages.

2. The community.joomla.org site seems to have a less important role then it used to have. Probably because of the success of the Magazine and People sub-websites.

• Action item 3: we should communicate that *all* working group members should be able to post blog posts regarding joomla.org related matters.

3. The new ticket support platforma for the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) is working very well. Other teams might use the architektura for their own process communication as well. The “premium listings” pomysł is moving forward, but we’ll have to wait on a new stylistyka for the JED site before it can be implemented.

• Action item 4: evaluate new stylistyka for JED.

Furthermore we’ll have to make a decision about the Joomla version compatibility buttons.

• Action item 5: wait for a decision on the new Joomla version numbering, and create buttons for Long Time Support (LTS) versions.

Finally we’ll need input for the “standards” information: what evaluation items for extensions should be included.

• Action item 6: ask PLT / 3rd bibka extension developers for feedback on best practices for extensions.

4. There haven’t been any major changes regarding the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) besides one new featured hosting provider in the hosting provider section. It has been decided to duma Rochen as a featured hosting provider listing (Brad and Wendy were excluded from this discussion).

5. The forum, which is used for technical Joomla support, has been experiencing a great influx of spam the last year. Last May a new forum protection mechanism has been put in place. It decreased the amount of spammers drastically. The downside is that some people with dynamic IP addresses have problems reaching the forum because spammer’s IP addresses get automatically banned for some period. This resulted in three complaints from (non-spamming ;-) people over the last three months.

• Action item 7: create a contact form for issues like these, and łącze from the forum.

The new Joomla versioning system will increase the maintenance of main boards and international subboards because those have to be created. It has been decided to only create boards for Long Time Support (LTS) versions.

• Action Item 8: To ensure that we have enough forum coverage to support our users, we need to check in with any inactive moderators to see if their interest is still in being members of the moderator team

6. The People website lacks some moderation features.

• Action item 9: define the needed moderation features and write a Request For Proposals (RFP) to get the features developed.

7. JUGs
* 1st official Joomla book (from Person) was meant to be spread around all JUGs, but this did not work out as planned. There is an myśl to try using coupons that people can use to order copies of the books
Sandra + Liam will arrange it for the next books that are released in the series
* be more proactive: identify areas / countries where no JUGs are active (or where they are inactive) and try to reactivate / support people in those areas to organize JUGs.

8. Currently joomla.org does not have a credits page to acknowledge current as well as all previous contributors to the sites and infrastructure areas (software/design/support services donated to the project for use). This is something that can be worked in with the site redesign which is currently in progress *link to people site redesign group.

B. New candidates for CLT:

The current CLT members have selected people from the nominations that were submitted by the community. Invitations have been sent out to these folks and once confirmation has been received from them, we will announce this and welcome them to the CLT publicly.

C. Ways to improve processes to become more proactive

Currently a lot of teams are functioning in a reactive way, in the sense that a lot of actions will be taken when people from the (international) community ask for help. E.g. a community from some country may ask for help regarding organizing a Joomladay. This behavior might result in some countries and areas that are not covered. Action item 10: We should come up with ways to be more proactive. E.g. find uncovered countries and motivate local communities to organize events.

D. Version labeling for JED and Forums

We need to request clarification from the PLT regarding the version numbering as this affects some areas such as the JED compatibility labeling and the categorizing of support forums. (note: discussed by PLT and put forth since for community feedback)

E. Joomla.org and its community are very English orientated.

While English is the common language in the software world, the majority of the world population don't speak English. For Joomla! to be successful in the non Anglo-Saxon world, we must invest more (time) in local foreign language communities. We would like to increase Joomla use as well as recruit more volunteers from the non-Anglo-Saxon world. We realize that there are communication issues and barriers for participation that need to be addressed.

F. Combined Summit Notes Discussed during the CLT meeting Day 2:

During the combined summit the following communication issues have been identified:

1. Language barriers. Sometimes our communication is too difficult (e.g. difficult English words and sentences too long) and too much fragmented over different communication channels. And joomla.org has too much information to translate all to local languages.

2. For some countries the concept of Joomladays is not always clear. Furthermore there’s too little marketing budget for local foreign language communities to promote Joomla.

3. Documentation about processes in local communities is sometimes lacking. Which makes it difficult for people to take over the organisation of local JUGS when current JUG organiser steps down.

4. Official communication from Joomla.org to foreign non-English communities is too sometimes too difficult, and not helpful with solving the actual problem. Official documents (e.g. trademark rules) have often not been translated into foreign non-English languages.

During the combined summit the following participation issues have been identified:

1. Missing overview of all countries/language entities and local communities

2. How to organize responsibilities and autonomy of local communities in relation with Joomla.org?

3. Cultural barriers - in some countries people are not always that outspoken to the international community, only within their own local community.

4. In some cultures/countries the standards of living are not as high as they are in the western world. Which causes that some people have too little time to participate because they need to have multiple jobs to make their living which leaves no time to participate. In that case working as volunteer doesn’t have much incentives / rewards back.

At the combined summit two new problems regarding joomla.org have been found: The International flags in the main jadłospis are confusing visitors, as when they click on a flag they expect to be taken to a page that contains content and/or language packs respective to each flag. This creates an additional rafa in that, by looking at those flags, one might assume that certain languages are missing.

• Action item 11: find a better way to represent “internationalism” and create an image/button for the joomla.org website.

Another issue that has been brought forward is that the current joomla.org site is missing a search box.

• Action item 12: find out why the search box has not been placed on the homepage, and put it there if needed.

During the combined summit we’ve decided to compile a spreadsheet to take inventory of countries, languages, regions, local communities, nature of those communities, and in what countries communities are missing. [action item solved]. Secondly we’ve divided the world in regions: North-America, South-America, Europe, Africa, Asia+Pacific. Each pas gets assigned one or two regional community coordinators / contact persons who will help with making the inventory. After we have such an overview they will get in touch with the local communities to find our their needs (e.g marketing, translation), get information and opinions, and help with updating the Joomla Info Pages project (to redirect international people to the local community sites). A further update will be provided to the community when it is time to put this myśl into action and request volunteer help.

In Closing...

we would like to say that we enjoyed our time at the summit so much. Not only together as the CLT but with our friends and fellow kadra narodowa members on the Open Source Matters board and the Production Leadership Team. It was a very productive and positive event and we thank everyone that we were able to attend the summit with, as well as the incredible Joomla Community, whom without, we would not have been able to take part.

Comments and Discussion are welcome in this thread at the Joomla! People site.

For those new to these extensions, Community Builder is one of the oldest (and possibly most used) Joomla extensions.  It has a plugin architektura and lets you quickly develop user profiles for logged in members; with custom fields and member lists.  Because its Open Source and how long its been around, there are a ton of plugins to give you google maps of your members, on-going/live (facebook wall-type) listings of member activity on their profiles and more.

Jom Social isn't Open Source.  Its a commercial release from the Malaysian web development firm Azrul Studio.  They're well known for simple blogging and commenting extensions and have recently released Jom Social - which pretty much gives you the same functionality as Community Builder for $100+ but doesn't require must setup/configuration once installed.

There's been discussion in the Joomla forums about this topic before and I think people are most concerned about the lock-in factor of using commercial software plus the question of how integrated JomSocial is to Joomla itself.

Before I jump into a comprehensive review next week, I wanted to ask for your thoughts on Community Builder vs Jom Social. (Post comments! :) )

For those of you working with access control lists (ACL) in Joomla 1.6, you should know about the new core permission that has been introduced in Joomla 1.7 beta. The new permission is called "offline access". This allows certain user groups to log into the przód end of the website when the site is offline.

The Community Workgroup Teams were busy as ever during the month of August. Below are the reports rounded up from the Community Workgroup Google Group.

Over the last few months I have had the privilege of serving on two hiring committees. As I did so, I noticed that what email address someone had, could make a difference to how their application was treated. Let's face it, it's a tough job market out there right now, and people should give themselves every advantage they can! Would you give an application its due if you see its from ilovecats@hotmail.com?

Back in Nov 2006, I wrote the following blog post: What is 'contributing' to an Open Source Project?

Every so often I like to take a look at how we are now doing, in comparision to how we have been doing in the past. Having taken the time to do so recently, I'm really encouraged, and hopefully as a follow up in my series, I hope you'll benefit for reflecting with me, if you've been around for a while, or if you're only new, joining me and contributing.

Let me początek with my conclusion I wrote back then:

There is no utopia. No one, and no project, is perfect. Do we have faults, yes, some of them may be more important to you than they are to me, however the fact remains, if you are here for Joomla, the structure is already in place (maybe not ideal, or perfect) for your contribution to be accepted.

From my point of view, this still stands as true today as it was almost 4 years ago when I first wrote this. However, what I'm most encouraged about is the progress we have made in being able to accept the many and varied contributions of so many people. In some ways our structure has also improved to facilitate this. Let's dig a little deeper into this now.

What is contributing to an Open Source Project?

OK, so this is firmly in the krawędź category. I recently got an email from a good friend of mine who is a veterinarian. She is starting her own practice and seeking website advice. I said I'd be happy to help, and in our emails back and forth she sent me a odnośnik to a site she liked. I checked it out, and it was OK. It was created by a company that makes vet websites. I looked at some of their services, and a gradual sense of powieść grozy took over.