Joomla! Community & Leadership Blogs

As this is my initial public blog post I’d like to say “Hello and it’s nice to meet you!” I’m David Hurley and in case you’ve not seen the previous posts, I am the Community Development Manager for Joomla. I’ve worked with Joomla since before it was Joomla and have had opportunity to continue to develop in Joomla for many years. If you are interested in more of my bio, you can check out the official appointment post below (or ask me). But for now I’d like to move on to the good stuff. Over the last few days, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from a couple of great people wondering a bit more about what my role involves and what I’ve been able to work on so far. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to provide a status report of sorts regarding how things are progressing, what’s been accomplished, and how excited I am about the future.

Details: Published: 14 March 2013

The goals of the Community Leadership Team (CLT) for 2013 are published below.

Goal A: Launch Joomla Volunteers portal

In 2013 we are are planning to launch a new Joomla Volunteers portal to make it easier to contribute to the Joomla community and track the progress of projects that people are working on. Part of this idea is to create a public marketplace to match skills, interests and available time of volunteers with the available project tasks. This also allows to thank the people involved within the Joomla project.

Goal B: Update community.joomla.org

The community.joomla.org site is using Joomla 1.5 and needs to be migrated to a recent Joomla version. Together with this migration the content needs to be reorganized and improved. The website should provide a complete overview of all news available around the Joomla project.

Goal C: Update extensions.joomla.org

The Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) has grown a lot over the past years and the current structure doesn't fulfill all the needs anymore. In 2013, we are planning to release a new version of the JED with improvements for the end users, listing owners and the JED maintainers. This new version will be custom made to match the needs of the JED. The JED team started to work on this already.

Details: Written by: Sander Potjer; Published: 12 March 2013

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.

Details: Published: 08 March 2013

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.

Details: Published: 06 March 2013

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.