"It's a powerhouse of Joomla talent" is how Andrew Eddie described the list of people attending the Joomla! Developer Conference next weekend.  It's exciting to think about having all of that brain power in one room talking about the future of Joomla!. The conference is going to start off with a Saturday morning of "unpacking 1.6" looking at API changes starting with Access Control, Nested Sets and JForm.   And it ends on Sunday afternoon with a look to the future with "1.7 and Beyond." In between there are all kinds of interesting topics from MooTools with Aaron Newton to breakouts on an already amazing list of things that people want to talk about.

This is the first event ever aimed specifically at third party developers as an audience. Everyone with a Joomla! website knows how important extensions are. But it's pretty amazing to reflect on the huge size of the third party developer part of the Joomla! ecosystem. There are more that 1600 extension developers in the Joomla! Extensions Directory alone and that doesn't count thousands of people writing custom extensions or customizing existing ones. This morning there are 3727 extensions inthe JED. That's an average of 5 a day either new or updated from 1.0 since the release of Joomla! 1.5 in January 2007. And almost all of them have had multiple releases over those 23 months.That amount of productivity and engagement is totally mind blowing to me. Sometimes in the rush of day to day operations it is really good to see that big picture.

A lot of people in the FOSS world like Eric Raymond's essays in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.  In the Joomla! ecosystem we really do have a bazaar. You can walk through the JED and make choices, find what you need, let something interesting catch your eye. Everyone is in there, from the person writing her first extension to the highly experienced developer. And they are all working to make the best software. The bazaar makes for incredible creativity and innovation. As Raymond points out, free and open source software licensing encourages this kind of extreme creativity.

Thanks to all those developers, the people who participate in their projects, the people who manage the JED, Joomlacode, the mailing lists, developer documentation and the development forums all of which facilitate the Joomla! Bazaar.