The Community Leadership Team has created a relief system for the backlog of Joomla User Group (JUG) submissions and correspondence. We would like your help to make this work though.

As of right now, if you are on the waiting list of people who have not heard back about a JUG submission, We have a new form that we ask you to fill out at your earliest convenience.

Resubmit your application using  JUG Submission Form

We know you are tired of forms!  So are we.  For now though this is only a stop gap solution while we work on something more permanent and efficient for all.  We feel this new form can be processed on our end much faster than the current system.

We would appreciate any feedback you have to offer in the JUGs People.Joomla group.

Thank you for your patience! Joomla User Groups make up a valuable component of our community. We appreciate your continued efforts and we look forward to working with you as we resolve this issue as quickly and effectively as possible.

On behalf of the Community Leadership Team, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Sandra Warren and Matt Lipscomb as our newest members.

Sandra has been instrumental in organizing a brand new team to help with the beta launch of People Site.  As co-admin, her efforts have helped steer our community into new territory here on joomla.org and she's done a tremendous job of it.  Sandra and her team are now hard at work getting the People Site ready for its upcoming Official Launch.

Matt currently works on various Community Workgroup teams including the Site Showcase, Support Forums, JCM and the JRD.  He does an outstanding job in all.  Some of Matt?s more recent contributions include a discussion with the community to find ways to make JRD inclusion easier and the Joomla! Weekly Challenge which encourages people to contribute in various ways to the project and global community.

We think Sandra and Matt will be excellent additions to our team and we thank them for taking on this added role to their current positions in the project.

Sandra, Matt... Welcome!

I'm pleased to announce that the OSM Board has new leaders filling critical roles in our organization.

During the past few months, I've spearheaded a project inside Open Source Matters (OSM) to delineate clear roles and responsibilities for a few important positions within our organization.  The goal of this project was to enable our team to more effectively match board members' talents with positions that set them up for success and provided clear objectives and responsibilities.  By putting this project into action, Board members are able to clearly understand what is expected of them within each position, as well as measure their success more objectively with metrics developed by them and their fellow teammates.

This project also provides the Board an opportunity to have a written understanding of the scope these positions.  In the professionalizing of our Board, I strongly believe that actually writing down these positions roles and responsibilities are key to us achieving our goals, and keeping our sanity.  I've even gone as far as to tell candidates for Board positions that one of their key goals should be to find ways to make themselves "obsolete", or in other words, ensure that when it's time for them to hand over their leadership position to another colleague, the new leader can focus on innovation rather than needing to rebuild systems from scratch.

You probably didn't notice, but recently we have republished the "Support Joomla!" page. We also have a new "Support Joomla!" module for anyone to use. This is exciting because for the past several years we have not been able to ask the Joomla! Community for financial support. What happened?

As I mentioned back in February, at the advice of our attorneys, and with a lot of reflection, the board of Open Source Matters (OSM)  had been exploring the possibility of "correcting" its corporate charter. Those corrections have now been made, and this post will explain what that means. The specific changes could not be discussed previously because they were legal advice, but now we can do so. There are complicated legal and financial reasons for making these changes which I am going to try to explain in this post.   It will be a little heavy going, so before I start let me stress the two main points:

• OSM will always remain a not for profit organization.
• This change will allow OSM to ask for money for support of the Joomla! Project.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Mooing Forward With Joomla! 1.5
  

  Since the release of Mootools 1.2, we have found ourselves facing a rather difficult question - what do you do with the 1.5 core?  Unfortunately, the changes that came in Mootools 1.2 were significant enough that backwards compatibility with Mootools 1.1 was a difficult task.  I like to compare it to the difference between Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5.  We did a lot of house cleaning and made our framework much smoother and much cleaner.

  Such is the case for Mootools 1.1 and Mootools 1.2.  The new Mootools represents a significant step forward.

  As a result, Joomla! developers have found themselves in a difficult position. Do you use the outdated version of Mootools, thereby reducing compatibility issues and making life easier for users, or do you use the new version and attempt one of a variety methods of overriding the core framework.

  We hope to change all of that in the near future.

  As has been previously mentioned, it is our plan to give Joomla! 1.5 an upgrade to Mootools 1.2.  This will allow developers to take advantage of the improvements that this new version offers and to write code that will endure into the future.

  We have set a target release date of July 15, 2010 for Joomla! 1.5 with Mootools 1.2.

  The Gory Details

  I previously released an upgrade plugin for people to test out which replaced the core JHtmlBehavior class. This plugin implemented the JHtmlBehavior::framework method that has been added in trunk. The Mootools upgrade that will be included with Joomla! 1.5 will follow along in this direction.

  After the 1.5 update is uploaded, the plugin will be installed the first time an administrator logs into the administrator panel.  They will also be presented with a message asking them if they would like to enable the plugin. Once the plugin is enabled the site will then be using Mootools 1.2.

  When the plugin is enabled whenever the framework Mootools library is loaded Mootools 1.2 will be loaded with the compatibility layer.

  The hope is that even with the upgrade activated, there will be no negative impact on sites. However, in the event that the upgrade does cause problems, it will be easy for administrators to disable the plugin and restore their site to the previous state.

  We're excited about this development and are grateful to the folks at Mootools who have worked with us to provide a compatibility layer that could make this possible.

  The code is a work in progress. If you would like to check it out you are free to check it out from http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/branches/mt12.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Joomla! Community Workgroup May 2010 Report
  

  Recently the Joomla Community Workgroup came up with an idea to share just how much work is being done with the wider community by way of a monthly team report. You can see the source of the combined report I have compiled below here.

  It's an incredible snapshot of the 100's of volunteers working on this part of the Joomla Project. Thanks must also to go to the support OSM ( www.opensourcematters.org ) gives to our project, as well as the Joomla Production Workgroup.

  Read on for the full report, it's amazing!

  
  

  
  
  
  
• What is 'contributing' to an Open Source Project? Take three
  

  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 start 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?

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Joomla! 1.6 help screens: Call for help
  

  With the release of Joomla! 1.6 beta 1 looming large, the time has come to start ramping up the user documentation effort in anticipation of that milestone.  One of our highest priority goals is to have a complete set of up-to-date help screens available by the time 1.6 goes stable and preferably before then so that the translation teams have time to do their work too.  To help us achieve that goal I'm looking for volunteers to form a small team that can work to write the new help screens.  This is a perfect opportunity for those of a less technical bent to make a significant contribution to the Joomla! project.
  
  The trunk now includes a modified help system that pulls help screens from the wiki at http://docs.joomla.org.  This is fully functional and you can see it action by installing the latest SVN code or one of the nightly builds.  But right now, clicking on the administrator toolbar help buttons will bring up only holding pages, most of which pull the old Joomla! 1.5 help screens as a temporary measure.
  
  There is a complete list of the Joomla! 1.6 help screens here: http://docs.joomla/org/Help16:Help_screens and this also acts as a control sheet showing progress towards our goal of having all the help screens completed by the time 1.6 goes stable.  As you can see, there are around 50 screens to be completed.  At the present time most of them are "transclusions" of the old 1.5 help screens; that is to say, they contain a simple one-line statement that pulls in the old content.  Every single one of these will need to be replaced with new content that covers 1.6 specifically.  This is not as daunting as it might at first appear; there is much in the 1.5 help screens that can be carried over into the 1.6 screens.
  
  So, I'm looking for people who are willing and able to carry out one or more of the following tasks:

  • write new help screens, based on the original 1.5 help screens.  You don't need to have deep knowledge of 1.6 to do this, but a willingness to learn is essential.  Familiarity with wiki syntax is helpful, but not essential as everything you need to know about the wiki can be learned in about 10 minutes.
  • create screenshots of all the required elements and upload them using the wiki image naming conventions.  On some images you will need to use some kind of annotation tool to highlight specific aspects of an image, so you will need to be familiar with image editing tools with this capability.
  • proofread the help screens, correcting typographical and grammatical errors and ensuring that they actually make sense!
  • monitor changes to 1.6 as they occur and be able to flag where changes to the help files are needed.  There will doubtless be changes to the user interface during the process of moving from beta to stable and we don't want to miss anything!

  This is a great opportunity for non-developers to contribute something really important to the project.  If you'd like to get involved then please contact me at chris.davenport@joomla.org and we can get started straight away.