I spend a lot of time with family and friends during past Christmas. These days are traditionally very relaxed, and at the end of a year I always tend to look back on what has been done and what I would like to see happening for the upcoming year. As with many others people I use the brand new year to look ahead and share my dreams for what I would like to see happening in 2009 for the Joomla! project. Let's start with looking back from the perspective of a development coordinator.

 Joomla! in 2008

• 2008 was a big milestone for Joomla! The fully refactored 1.5 was released on January 22nd of 2008 and we have seen 8 maintenance releases afterward.
• The Joomla! bug Squad has matured. This team, set up in late 2007 has been working hard to be the cornerstone of the group that drives Joomla! maintenance. When I created the bug squad I was dreaming of a more open organisation. The bug Squad now has around 70 members, and is organized around two team leaders (Ian MacLennan and Mark Dexter) and two co-maintainers (Ian MacLennan and Kevin Devine) who are responsible for committing the provided (and tested) patches.
• During this years Summer of Code (SoC) we had 15 projects, of which 10 finished successfully. Again we have to thank Google for the great support they have given again to the Joomla! project, a big thanks also goes to the SoC participants. I hope we can have at least the same amount of projects going this year.
• Development of Joomla! 1.6 has started. We had a slow start, but as Andrew mentions in his happy new year post on the developer site things are shaping.
• The sites where redesigned into a new look an feel.
• End of life for Joomla! 1.0.x has been announced. Support of this version will end at June 22nd 2008 as announced in the "An old friend comes of age" blog.
• In August of this year I resigned from the core team, and in September I joined the board of OSM.
• On December 21th the JED team announced they will phase out all 1.0.x extension.
• Two days later the JED team also announced they are going to be full GPL on the extension directory.
• JED passed the 4.000 extensions marker, and we also went passed the 7.000.000 download marker (not counting the localized versions).

Dreams for 2009

• The release of Joomla! 1.6 and the start of development of Joomla! 2.0. The most important feature for Joomla! 1.6 will be the new ACL, but also the update logic, (partly) refactoring of the code-base, addition of new triggers, implementation of object level and module position caching are features that most likely will go into 1.6.
• Move to a developers eco-sphere that is more open. Currently we are struggling with creating new versions of Joomla! This is because we have a shortage of developers actually being active on the core code-base. During the development work-group summit in January we will certainly discuss this and see how we could move to a more open model of development, feedback/input is welcome (just mail or leave a reply in this topic).
• Opening of a Joomla! laboratory. An open environment where people can join in and work on cool new, innovative Joomla! solutions.
• See applications being build on top of the application framework. Joomla! is known as a content management system (CMS), but not everyone is aware that the CMS is basically build on top of the Joomla! application framework. I would like to see people start developing web applications on top of this application framework.
• Release of the application framework (separately from the CMS part). See also the previous topic. I would love to see the future CMS versions being just an application on top of the application framework.
• A full rewrite of com_content and addition of new (must have) features like RDF, micro-formats and a fully accessible back-end.

Thoughts for 2009

Most of the topics mentioned in the previous paragraph will most likely be on the agenda of the first Development Coordinator Summit in Australia in January 2009. Along with Andrew, Anthony, Louis and Sam we are going to discuss for sure the 1.6 finalisation approach and hopefully be close to the first alpha after the summit. I am pretty certainly we will discuss the other topics also.

Looking at the bigger picture we see a shift in the market. Content management systems are getting main stream, and the top class projects (Wordpress, Drupal, Alfresco to name a few) will have the attention of the bigger professional companies. Wordpress, Drupal and Alfresco are project that have some big names supporting them, and with that they are able to move very fast implementing new versions and features. Not only are these projects able to move fast, there will also be professional services surrounding these projects. I personally think we will see companies move in exactly the same direction with Joomla!

The project has become incredible big, and to sustain the growth and position we are in currently we need to work on enabling people to contribute more. Progression is slower then we would like to see because the failure to execute many of the ideas and plans that we have. First of all I would like to see the number of SoC project grow, and also see more community involvement in mentoring and student involvement so that more of the final results will go back into the Joomla! project. Let's not forget that this project exists because of the people who contribute, and for that all of us should strive to remove barriers to participation and single points of failure. On to many areas we rely on individual contributors that spend countless hours to keep things running. Let's prevent these people from burning out. For that I urge companies that use Joomla! to contribute back to the project in substantial ways, not only with financial donations but preferable offer manpower to work on Joomla! tasks.

Events for 2009

Having visited 8 Joomla!days in 2008 and some other events I don't have the full agenda plotted yet, but the first quarter of the year is pretty filled already. I will visit the following events:

• Development Coordinator Summit in Australia from 22 to 26 of January. As mentioned before we discuss 1.6 and other topics related to Joomla! development. We will try to send out at least a summary of what we discussed, even try to blog on it on a daily basis.
• Fosdem 2009 in Belgium (Brussels) on 8 and 9 February. We will have a booth there and I have applied for a session there. Please meet us there, or if you have time help out with manning the booth. We already have an exciting crew lined up (Alex Kempkens, Arno Zijlstra, Antonie de Wilde, Peter Martin, Marijke Stuiverberg) but we always can use more people.
• Joomla!day United Kingdom (Oakwood House, in Maidstone, Kent) on 13th and 14th March. There will be participation of a number of well known Core Team members, Open Source Matters Board members, and other Joomla! community members. The agenda for the Joomla!day is put together based on an overview of topics, if you can go there this is a must go event for Joomlers.
• Joomla!day United States (Las vegas) on 3, 4 and 5 April. The Friday will be spend on professional training, I will do a training on securing Joomla! (including extensions), Andrew will cover design and deployment of extensions and Anthony will cover the Joomla! framework. The Saturday will be a community day and the sunday most likely will be a developers meetup.