Today I was doing some work on JoomlaCode, looking at performance and logging to see what was happening and I noticed something really quite cool. Every week on average a little over 3600 extensions are installed into Joomla! 1.5 sites directly from JoomlaCode. You can do it yourself, navigate through JoomlaCode, find something you want to install but copy the URL of the download instead of downloading it to your computer. Then log into your Joomla! 1.5 site and paste the URL into the "Install from URL" box. Assuming you've got everything you need, it'll download and install the extension for you. Now it may not work properly in all hosting environments, especially ones who have disabled access to the web through either PHP or by blocking the actual connection at a firewall level.

Looking through the list of user agents we've got the usual selection of browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera), we've got tried and true downloader 'wget' grabbing files here and there, we even have some mobile browsers from DoCoMo flicking around the site and over 43k hits identifying as Google Chrome already. We've also got all of your friendly spiders floating about (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) as well as some language specific ones for languages like Chinese and Korean (e.g. Baidu). We've also got Feedreaders coming in and even some requests identifying themselves as various Java versions. Last but not least we've got Subversion clients coming in as well pulling up data from our various repositories.

So in 1.5 we added the ability to install from a URL, and it looks like people are using it. So what are we doing when we start looking at 1.6? Well we're going to start leveraging this to provide an update system that'll allow you to, within Joomla!, update your extensions. We're going to add some new extension types, such as libraries and packages. We've also done some work changing the way the installer system looks and we're unifying all of those extensions on under one 'manage' tab. Its not yet ready but its starting to take shape with little bits here and there coming together. We're nowhere near done with it but it is coming and we're hoping it'll have some really cool features for both developers and users.

To round up, Brad and Ron did some great work over the last few days upgrading JoomlaCode to the latest release of GForge and it seems to be running beautifully and has a new refreshing look. So we thank both GForge and Rochen for providing the application and hosting environment to keep JoomlaCode alive and the great resource it is for the community.