Blogs

I was poking around our very own Joomlacode.org site today and started looking at some recent download statistics. As you may know, reliable market share information for open-source CMS packages is hard to find, and it is especially difficult to assess recent trends. However, Joomlacode tracks all file downloads (including those from the one-click version updates), and these do provide some useful data. Here are some numbers I found interesting.

In the last six months (September 2012 – February 2013), we registered the following download counts for full packages (excluding the update packages):

  • Joomla 2.5: 1,725,268 (about 288k per month)
  • Joomla 3.0: 796,340 (about 133k per month)

During this period, we averaged about 420k downloads per month of our two flagship products.

One of the agreements reached at the May 2012 leadership summit was to form an overall project goals and strategy working group. This working group includes members from each of Joomla's leadership teams: Chris Davenport (Production Leadership Team), Olaf Offick (Community Leadership Team), and Paul Orwig (Open Source Matters).

The purpose of this new working group is to work with the project's leadership and help define a three year vision statement for the project along with a set of one year overall project goals, and then to support the formation of working groups that will work on the different overall project goals.

It is almost time for Joomla 3.1 Beta and we wanted to give you a quick sneak-peek at the proposed new Tags feature to get you excited for it, which at this point looks like it will likely get in for Joomla 3.1 or at the latest for Joomla 3.2. Tags are a kind of meta-data that allow you to assign a keyword or keywords to a particular item. Since it's meta data, core and custom extensions could theoretically organize and display that meta-data in many different ways. For example, you might tag some contacts in Contact Manager as "Joomla Bug Squad" and do the same for some articles in Article Manager. You could then create a menu item (or use a module) to display, within a list, all the items tagged as "Joomla Bug Squad".

We also hope that this article will generate interest among extension developers and that you will consider budgeting some development time in the next few weeks to add tagging to your extensions. We feel this will be an important core feature that will add value to your extensions and provide an all-around tagging solution for users.  The great news is that Tags is very easy to integrate into your extensions.  Click here to find out how.
 

In December of 2012, the Community Oversight Committee (COC) notified the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) that they had started the process to dissolve their committee. That process included consulting with an attorney experienced in such matters who could draft the necessary changes to the OSM by-laws. The COC also asked for feedback from OSM board members regarding if they agreed or disagreed with this proposed change.

In February of 2013, the COC notified OSM that they had voted unanimously to dissolve their committee. They also shared a set of revisions to the OSM by-laws to reflect this proposed change that were written by the previously contacted attorney.

The spring time is drawing upon us, and for student developers, this is an exciting time of year. Google has again announced that it will be running the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. Continuing on the successes of previous years, the Joomla! Project will once again apply to participate in this program.