Joomla! Community & Leadership Blogs
Blogs
The board of directors of Open Source Matters (OSM) is requesting public feedback from our community members through March 6, 2014, regarding a potential license change for the Joomla! Framework from the GPL to the LGPL. This potential license change would only apply to the Joomla Framework, but not to the Joomla Content Management System (CMS).
- Details
Shortly after being selected to serve as Treasurer of Open Source Matters, I presented my vision for managing the financial interests of the Joomla project. This short presentation (PDF) was delivered at the 2013 Leadership Summit in November in Boston.
The main point of the presentation was to solicit feedback from all the leadership teams regarding things that were working well when it came to the project’s accounting practices, and of course things that needed improvement. The main takeaways from this part of the summit were as follows:
- The financial health of the project remains strong
- Financial reporting per leadership team is not currently possible
- The Chart of Accounts is not intuitive
- Financial status reports need simplification
Finding solutions
To address these issues, it became clear that a complete restructure of the project’s Chart of Accounts was required. Critically, the new Chart of Accounts would need to be implemented at the same time as the 2014 budget.
This was further complicated by the timing of the Christmas holidays and the busy season that often follows.
Coincidentally, a colleague who has experience in such things recommended the Unified Chart of Accounts (UCOA) for nonprofit organizations.
After some research and conversations with our accountants, I decided this was a good choice for the Joomla project.
However, this did not solve our issues with reporting on a per-team basis.
The Joomla project uses Quickbooks as our accounting software. In addition to supporting a Chart of Accounts to organize transactions into the common financial categories (i.e. income, expenses, payables, receivables, etc…), Quickbooks “Classes” can be used to organize transactions into any categories you want. Importantly, we have full control over what those categories are.
To solve the reporting problem, I decided to use Leadership Teams as classes: CLT, PLT, OSM and INF (for Infrastructure, or expenses shared among the teams), as well as some other common classes like Events.
- Details
The JED Team will be closing down the Joomla 1.5 Extensions Archive on March 1, 2014.
The archive was created in February of 2013, following community feedback, to allow users an additional year to find Joomla 1.5 extensions. It also has aided developers to transition their extensions and in some cases fork abandoned extensions to 2.5 and 3.x.
The JED's 1.5 Timeline
- April 1, 2012: we stopped accepting Joomla 1.5 extension submissions.
- February 15, 2013: the Joomla 1.5 compatibility icon was disabled for new submissions.
- February 15, 2013: the Joomla 1.5 Extension Archive site was deployed on http://archive.extensions.joomla.org.
- March 1, 2013: We removed listings that were marked as Joomla 1.5 only and removed the 1.5 icons.
- March 15, 2013: all non-compatible listings were purged from the system.
- March 1, 2014: the Joomla 1.5 Extension Archive site will be closed.
A copy of the site will be packed and put into storage. At this time, we have no intentions of distributing or sharing any portions of the archive outside of the Joomla Project.
You can comment on this blog post here.
- Details
- Written by: Matthew Baylor
Start today & make sure you don't miss out !
Powering approximately 4% of the web, Joomla! is one of the leading content management systems today.
As a leading hosting company, positioning yourself to support Joomla can be a great value addition to your marketing strategy without any major impact on your infrastructure outlay in terms of hardware or manpower.
The minimum requirements for Joomla are pretty standard, but there are other steps you can take to ensure that your company is providing top quality support to your Joomla customer base.
- Details
- Written by: Ruth Cheesley
The 11th Safer Internet Day will be celebrated worldwide today, February 11, 2014.
- The theme for the day is: "Let's create a better internet together"
- It is like any other Tuesday on your calendar, but should it be?
- Just how secure is YOUR website?
- Just how safe is the information you store about your customers, clients and users?
Sadly, when it comes to security, any system can ultimately be compromised. But there are numerous small steps you can take that make the pathway to your data just a bit more difficult. Each little barrier adds up, making the task of breaking into your site just inconvenient enough for a hacker to move on to the next site instead of spending more time on yours.
- Details
- Written by: Ruth Cheesley