Over the last few months we've been having some changes around the development team and how things are working. We've got a few changes coming up, but I'll start with the people changes that are happening.

Wilco has stepped down from his development co-ordinator role within the project for a while and is now starting to focus on some work of his own. Joining him is Anthony who has in the last week stepped down to work on their new project. For them its exciting times and I'm sure they're looking forward to what the future has in store for them. Andrew has also stepped down to take care of some personal projects he has running in his life and spending some more time with his family. So I'd like to take a step back and thank these three guys for the stunning contributions that they've made over the years and wish them the best of luck in the future with their endeavours and I'm sure we'll see them around the project in less demanding roles. The fact that they've remained in the demanding and time consuming position of development co-ordinator is an incredible service to the project.

Continuing on as Development Co-ordinators we have Louis, Rob and myself - each of us looking forward to helping our new Release Team with the up and coming 1.6 release of Joomla!. The release team consists of Hannes, Ercan and Gergo who are some great people who I'm looking forward to see what they come up with the new release. The 1.6 release is also looking at some changes to the way we work as well but we'll have more details about that later. On the Bug Squad front we've got Ian, Mark and Kevin heading up the team that keeps Joomla! stable and who are working on the next release of Joomla! 1.5 with more fixes for increased stability. 

We've also seen more traffic on the new mailing lists with the General, CMS and Framework lists. If you're interested in development on any level, be it general stuff, work on the CMS aspects of the project or the deep core of Joomla!, the Framework parts. Joomla! Bug Squad's mailing list is also out there as well and we welcome people who are perhaps starting out with development in Joomla! to come and help out because the Bug Squad accepts all levels of skills: even if all you do is confirm that a bug exists and provide a method for replicating the issue then this helps us out. You can also work on the tracker to see what issues we have on our boards.

Last but not least I'd encourage any developers who have something that they want to build for Joomla! to have a look through the feature patch blog Wilco wrote up earlier in the year. We'd love to hear any feature patches and will review them for inclusion into the next release - don't forget to drop us a line on the CMS or Framework mailing lists when you've submitted your patch to the tracker so that we can have a look over it.

I look forward to seeing some new and interesting changes in the project and seeing more people contributing in new ways to the project, we all would love to see you here contributing in your own way.