Leadership Blog

JED goes Joomla 1.5 and GPL

Written by Brad Baker

Today we are proud to unveil our newest site upgrade!

The Joomla Extensions Directory , or JED as it is affectionately known was today upgraded to Joomla 1.5. Ironically the biggest visible changes though are the new template and a brand spanking new version of Mosets Tree GPL. We're sure there will be a few teething problems, however, with much input from the community many of the features you have requested and provided feedback on have now been implemented. Some of them include:


New top level category homepage: AS JED grows, there is a growing need to organize information in top level categories and starting from this upgrade, we now have category homepages on most top level categories. It shows you Popular, New, Recently Updated and one random extension from within the category. In addition to that, you will find links to Top Rated, Most Reviewed, Most Rated and Most Favored ranked within the category. With these features, it gives you a greater and faster way to find great extensions.

Improved Recently Updated list: The Recently Updated page will now only list extensions which has been updated by releasing a new version.  Extensions will will appear in this list only when they release a new version of their component, modules, plugins, languages or tools. This new list provides a much more accurate view of recently updated extensions.

New RSS Feed: RSS Feed for Recently Updated extensions

There are now up to 100 extensions for all Top extensions pages.

Developers can now upload 5 screenshots of their extension in addition to a logo

These are just some of the visible new additions to the directory. There are a lot of more changes under the hood and in the interface that will make the experience finding great extensions in JED even better.

Lee, from Mosets had this to say about the migration of Mosets Tree to Joomla! 1.5 as well as his decision to open source Mosets Tree:

"Mosets Tree has been compatible with Joomla! 1.5 through the use of legacy plugin since March 2008 so making it natively compatible is a logical progression of the extension. With the news of phasing out Joomla! 1.0 extensions in June 2009, there is no better time to do this than now. For a big site like JED, one of the advantage of going Joomla! 1.5 has been its performance gain and Mosets Tree has taken full advantage of this. Our tests have show up to 60% improvement in ApacheBench on the new JED, so you can expect some improvement in its load time.

We have also decided to open source two of our best-selling products - Mosets Tree and Hot Property starting with their respective native release for Joomla! 1.5. This will mark a major milestone for Mosets as an open source development company and we believe going open source will be the way forward for extensions to continue to thrive and succeed in Joomla!'s ecosystem."

We're sure this new upgraded website will continue to serve the interests of the Joomla community. It's already our most successful website in terms of traffic and hits (even more than www.joomla.org) and we expect it to continue to remain so. A special thanks to the hard working Editors who not only work each day to edit/approve Extensions, but have also provided much valuable feedback to help improve JED.

So.. what are you waiting for.. check it out now: extensions.joomla.org

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Impeding Retirement of an old(er) site

Written by Brad Baker

This is just a brief FYI. Today we took the dev.joomla.org site offline pending it's retirement. Much of the material this site hosted has already been moved/added to the docs.joomla.org wiki. However, we have put this site behind a login for the time being in case someone feels they still need access to migrate some of the left over material.

So.. it's good bye to an old friend. What's the next big development happening on the Sites and Infrastructure side of things? You'll just have to wait and see.

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What happened to the donation page?

Written by Elin Waring

Today we removed the donation page and links from the Joomla.org family of sites. We did this because our lawyers advised us that soliciting donations on the web creates a host of problems. When you ask for contributions on the web, you are asking all over the world. It turns out that just inside the United States there are over 40 different sets of laws and regulations that you have to comply with, and there are more in various other countries. To file all of the paperwork to be able to do this would cost thousands of dollars and then maintaining the appropriate records and forms each year would be thousands more. The Project gets about 15 percent of its income from donations via our web form, and the OSM board and core team decided that it does not make sense to spend almost the same amount doing that all that legal work. By the way, this doesn't mean we won't take donations, just that we can't ask for them.

Some good materials about this:
http://www.rsmmcgladrey.com/RSM-Resources/Publications/Fundamentals/Fourth-Quarter_1/Protect-your/
http://www.charitableregistry.com/faq.htm

Read more: What happened to the donation page?

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Save the Date - FOSDEM 2009

Written by Alex Kempkens

I'm very glad to announce that Joomla is granted a stand at the FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. We will not only promote the project during the 2 day event but also take the opportunity to talk to various people from other Open Source Projects. The FOSDEM is clearly one of the important Open Source conferences in Europe and it is clearly a place to be in February 2009. If you are around we would really be happy to welcome you on our stand. I created a little thread in our events forum talking about the event so if you are able to make it to Brussels let others know.

Please note that the lightning talks are still accepting applications until the 29th of December. So if you want to presentent something related Joomla just go ahead and we will try to support you best as we can.

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Joomla!Day revisited

Written by Alex Kempkens

It has been a while that Joomla! was presented in the lovely town of Madrid, Spain. This event was great not only from the location, the audience and the whole environment. A few weeks ago Franck contacted us again and told us that he finished the bookkeeping for the event and thanks to the sponsors of the event he was able to donate 500,- EUR to the JoomlaSpanish community and 1.500,- EUR to the Joomla! project. We are very, very pleased with that and like to thank the whole event team. Special thanks goes to Franck, Igor, Jesús and from JoomlaSpanish to Javi, Jordi, Jordi & Fernando.

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