The Joomla! Community Portal ™

JoomlaCode is scheduled for system maintenance for about an hour at 5am GMT on the 17th August, 2008. This is get JoomlaCode up to date and provide some performance improvements.

Check out http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=406&t=315680 for more information about the downtime and any further notices related to this down time.

Check out http://forum.joomla.org/viewforum.php?f=406 for up to date information on down time related to JoomlaCode.

Most likely if you've been hanging around the Joomla! forums for any amount of time, you've seen or heard of Brad Baker.

Brad is the Sites and Infrastructure Working Group Coordinator on the Core Team. As well as filling that role, he has also been our
Forum Administrator since the forums' begninning nearly three years ago.

As the Joomla! community and project continue to grow, the responsibilities of the Sites and Infrastructure team increase. Brad has decided to take a broader approach to all S&I endevours, leaving forum moderating and administrating to the Forum Workgroup that he has helped largely to foster and grow.

As a forum moderator, I cannot possibly count the amount of times an obvious solution to a forum issue has been "Ask Brad."   And always with a quick and sensible answer, he never left us hanging.  Thankfully, he has taught us well and we have all learned a lot from his leadership.

For what its worth, I'm not even sure if he ever actually stood up and volunteered to be this Great Leader.  But he was.  And are we ever lucky for that!

We'll miss Brad on the Forum Workgroup for sure, but he won't be far away:

"I intend to keep working on S&I stuff.. but keeping a general role, rather
than focussing on something like the forum. I still intend to be around of
course." ~ Brad Baker

Make no mistake, he is not leaving Joomla!, or the Core Team. And we will surely still see him around on the forums.

Brad, thanks.

You may have noticed something a little different on the Joomla! Forums the last couple of days. A little restructuring has been going on. It seems like every few months, the Global Mods put their heads together along with the other Moderators to try to make the Forum more effective. I can say that this time, I think we have done just that.

How many times have we seen that written in the forums, in one way or another?  And you know what, I agree.  Every last one of them.  Wait, who is the Joomla Support Staff?

That's right... there isn't a support staff.  New users to the forum frequently make the mistake of blaming unanswered posts on the failings of the nonexistent "support staff".

Sure, we've got forum moderators and administrators.  They are tasked with making sure the posts are in the right forums, that the posts follow the rules, signatures are in line with the guidelines, etc.

But while forum moderators frequently take the time to answer questions in the topics they moderate, that is merely a bonus.  The forum moderators are not responsible for answering support questions.

The Joomla! forum is entirely the responsibility of the community itself.  Every individual forum user has the ability to answer a question or two.  The more questions each user answers, at their own ability level, the fewer questions are left unanswered. 

I encourage everyone to read and answer as many questions as they can, because quite frankly that's the best way to learn.  Answering the questions you know and reading the ones you don't will eventually make you a Joomla! expert.

 

The JED has been slow to publish extensions lately.  Those of us not on vacation seem to have had a surge in professional or family commitments, and the backlog of extensions to be approved was far more than we expect of ourselves.

I know we are kind of programmed for instant gratification... but if your extension took you months to build I would think that we could all be patient enough to wait more than a few days for it to be released into the directory. The directory has thousands of extensions now which must be managed. Unfortunately in the course of approving and managing we also find wrongdoers that take a tremendous amount of time away from what we want to be doing (approving).

We've had lots of offers to join the JED to help with the backlog, but adding staff really isn't the answer. Due to the technical constraints of the system this would only result in more headache, not less.

The best way to make the extension process run faster is to make your listing as easy as possible to approve.  Rejecting extensions takes much longer than approving, because we must inform each individual why their extension wasn't approved.  Minimizing rejections saves us all a bunch of time and frees up time to manage other parts of the directory.
 

Speeding up the process of getting extensions published.

•       Please, make sure your download link goes directly to a page where we can download the file. Not the homepage. We waste a bunch of time trying to find downloads... then emailing the developer to inform them that their extension won't be published until we get it, you get the idea.
   
•       If your extension isn't published and you have changes to make to the description or other details, do NOT resubmit. Please email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to make the changes for you, or make them immediately after the extension is published. Duplicates in the queue bog down the entire process.
   
•       Please review the logo use guidelines. Many extensions are held up by a violation of the logo or trademark. And remember, for every extension we reject, we have to also obtain the owner's email address from the system and take the time to write an email. That doesn't seem like a lot, but believe me, following up on each of those emails, discussing them with the editors... it takes a lot of time.
   
•       Please download your own package from the front end of your website, as a user would, and attempt to install it. Often a developer will get so caught up in the development process that they don't check the final package. Anything that won't install is rejected, and we add additional time emailing the owner to let them know why it's rejected.
   
•       If your extension was not published and you'd like to know why, again don't resubmit, just email  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and someone will look you up and find out where you stand in the queue or read our notes as to what is preventing approval.

Extensions are published in order, so before we can move on to the next, we must resolve the problems with the current submission first (at least to the point of emailing the owner).

The most important thing anyone can do to speed up the approval process is not bog the system down with reviews and extensions that cannot be approved.  By taking extra care before submitting, you'll make the directory better for everyone.