Greetings Joomlers!

I have an important message to share with you regarding Joomla’s participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year. Unfortunately due to circumstances out of our control, Joomla was not accepted to participate in GSoC 2015.

I had a team primed and ready to go - we built out ideas on our ideas list, had some amazing plans in the works, and submitted all the necessary documentation and paperwork on time. But, as fate would have it, so did a lot of other projects who applied to Google as mentoring organizations.

I reached out to Google (as they recommend unaccepted organizations do) as to why we hadn’t been accepted. It turns out, that there was a record-setting number of organizations who applied, and the Google team decided to give newer organizations a little more visibility in the program this year. This meant that there simply wasn’t a slot available to Joomla this year. I know first hand what a tough decision controlling slots is, and I know the team at Google thought long and hard about this decision before ultimately deciding that first-time organizations needed a shot at GSoC.

It’s Okay!

I’ll be the first one to admit I was really quite sad and disappointed Joomla was not approved. I expressed my disappointment to the great team at Google as well as the GSoC team who had been working to get Joomla’s GSoC 2015 off the ground. At the end of the day, this was a decision that makes sense. Google gets quite a number of applications, and it’s only fair to allow other organizations to take advantage of the opportunity in the GSoC program.

The Joomla Community, in the spirit of Open Source Software, should all be happy for all the new organizations who have an opportunity to be involved in GSoC this year. Let’s encourage them to make the most of this opportunity and wish them the best of success. The right thing to do here is to be happy for those who worked hard to get in and try our best to come back even stronger and better next year!

Prepare for 2016!

Joomla 3 is a stable code base that’s moving forward with great strides in innovation of features for all our users. But I hope by 2016 to see a fresh, clean, Joomla 4 for students to sink their teeth into. My hope for 2016 is a brand new Joomla 4 CMS that will really draw some excitement and give the opportunity for the latest and greatest that modern programming and web technologies have to offer. If our community rallies together we can continue building great web publishing software to take GSoC, and the world, by storm.