The Joomla! Production Leadership Team (PLT) is pleased to announce the addition of four new members: Don Gilbert, Matt Thomas, Roberto Segura, and Thomas Hunziker.

The PLT is responsible for leading and coordinating the development of the Joomla! CMS and the Joomla! Platform. This includes releasing new versions, fixing bugs, adding new features, translating and creating documentation.
 
In June 2013, the PLT announced that they were seeking nominations from the community for several new members to join the team, the original article can be seen here: https://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1753-now-always-open-for-plt-nominations.html.  Many excellent candidates were nominated and the PLT took them all into consideration before making its decision.
 
With the addition of Roberto Segura, Don Gilbert, Matt Thomas and Thomas Hunziker, this brings the total PLT members to ten:
  • Michael Babker
  • Chris Davenport
  • Don Gilbert
  • Javier Gomez
  • Thomas Hunziker
  • David Hurley
  • Tom Hutchison
  • Nick Savov
  • Roberto Segura
  • Matt Thomas


Don Gilbert

Don Gilbert has been working with Joomla since 2007. He became active in the community around 2011, asking and answering questions on the mailing lists. He’s been a member of both the JBS and JSST, and has had many code contributions to the CMS and Platform, such as code style improvements and writing unit tests. In 2012, Don felt the need to really push Joomla development forward, and thus initiated the namespacing effort on the Joomla Platform, which became the foundation for the Joomla Framework.
 

Roberto Segura

Roberto Segura is a spanish web developer who started to use Joomla! in 2011. He has contributed to both Platform & CMS and is one of the CMS maintainers on Github. He has participated in the latest RAD & JUX code sprints and is one of the most active CMS contributors. He loves open source and has also contributed to other projects like Twitter Bootstrap and Prestashop.
 

Thomas Hunziker

Thomas Hunziker works in informatics for a Swiss telecommunication company. He started with Joomla! 1.5 around end of 2007 because the text editor wasn’t working anymore. About two years later he started writing his own extensions. From there it was a small step to help other users in the forums and also to fixing bugs. This is what he still loves doing, especially on the coding side of things.
 

Matt Thomas

Matt Thomas's web career formally began in 2000 when he joined a start-up venture in Connecticut. While there, he founded betweenbrain. Matt has been a team leader in the Joomla Bug Squad and a presenter at numerous Joomla events.  He created the Construct Template Framework, one the first Joomla template frameworks, as well the Joomla Ajax Interface.
 

Thanks Mark!

The Production Leadership Team would also like to take the chance to say a very heartfelt thanks to Mark Dexter who has chosen to step down from the PLT after serving for more than 4 years. Fortunately, Mark is not going far and will continue to co-lead the Bug Squad.
 
Mark has been a key member of the Joomla project and his contributions are too numerous to detail; however, just to give a few examples, he has contributed to the following areas:
  • Coordination of new Joomla releases
  • Coordination of the Joomla Bug Squad
  • Creation of documenation which has lowered barriers to contribution and helped the development community to be more committed to the project.
  • Coordination of Google Summer of Code
  • Review of community feature requests on http://ideas.joomla.org/
  • Joomla forums and mailing lists, where he answered hundreds of questions about Joomla
  • Code contribution, such as 3.2’s Content Versioning
  • Creation of help screens for Joomla 2.5 
If you would like to congratulate the new members or say thanks to Mark, you can do so in the following forum topic:
https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=704&t=825345