The Community Workgroup Teams were busy as ever during the month of August. Below are the reports rounded up from the Community Workgroup Google Group.

As many of you know, in late 2009 it was decided by OSM and the project leadership to contract with Andrew Eddie and Louis Landry and to pay them for working on the Joomla! project. This was a very big step and was only undertaken after much discussion and careful consideration. There was strong agreement in the OSM and project leadership for this decision. Formal and informal polling of community members found a substantial majority in favor of the concept, with a minority opposed to it. Some of those opposed had strong feelings against it.

From the start, the plan was for Andrew to focus on coding for version 1.6 and for Louis to help support Andrew but also to work on longer term and infrastructure projects. This general plan is still in place today, although some of the specifics have changed over time as version 1.6 has moved from alpha to beta.

The Production Leadership Team (PLT) was tasked with the role of setting the priorities for this work and providing supervision and oversight. Initially, this was done informally. Recently, we have instituted a more formal process whereby the PLT has started issuing monthly reports to OSM and the community on the work completed and goals going forward.

What does this mean to you? Just this. The PLT makes the decisions about what gets worked on and the priorities going forward. So, for example, if you have ideas or concerns about what either of these individuals is working on (or not working on), you should express them to the PLT, not to Andrew or Louis.

If you don't like the whole idea of paying them for doing this work, then you are absolutely entitled to that opinion. But again, your difference of opinion is with the project leadership and the OSM leadership, not with Andrew or Louis.

I only wish the PLT could take the credit for the fantastic work that these guys have been doing during this time. But that credit goes to them alone.

In a community as large and diverse as ours, there are always going to be disagreements. This issue is particularly sensitive and one on which people can have very strong feelings. I hope that people on both sides of this issue can work together and keep their disagreements respectful.

Who said becoming a Registered JUG was easy? WE DID!

New, Easier Application Process for Joomla User Groups

The JUG team is proud to present a new and improved system for JUG applications.  After a short interim period using a temporary relief system,  the entire process was restructured from the ground up to provide a more streamlined approach to all areas of the process. 

The requirements and guidelines have been changed as well to allow more Registered JUGs worldwide.  If you'd like to register a JUG, please visit the FAQ on how to get started.  

Many JUG applications that were previously rejected or held up, have now been approved and listed in the new directory.  Please check your location to ensure your JUG is included.  If not, please reapply through our new application process.

New Directory and Map For All Joomla User Groups

We've created directory and map for all Joomla User Groups. By using Moset's Tree and Moxie Maps the directory listings are now plotted on a worldwide map which allows for easy and powerful searches. Click here to see the new map and directory.

Each approved JUG has a login and is now able to login to their listing and make changes.  Submitted changes will go into the queue and will be approved in a timely manner.  We ask that all JUG Owners please login and update your details as soon as possible.

New Team Members

The JUG team has also grown and now includes Wlima Howell, Cristina Solana, Himanshu Nagpal, Roger Perren as well as Sandra Warren and Javier Gomez.

Your Feedback is Welcome

Thank you for your patience through this process!  We invite you to submit feedback to this new process and system at the People.Joomla.Org group and if you need assistance please email us at jugs@community.joomla.org

The Production Leadership Team (PLT) is the group of people that is responsible for keeping the machinery that produces the Joomla software maintained and in good working order.  The PLT aims to meet in person once or twice a year.  The last development related summit was held in Australia in January of 2009 and this meeting was pivotal for bringing in necessary changes to the organisational and communication structure of the Joomla production system, lowering the barriers to entry for contribution significantly.

The next PLT Summit will be held around the Joomla Day West in San Jose in October this year.  Prime focus will be given to establishing the policy and process we need to revise in order to make Joomla 1.7, and all future versions, happen in a more timely and efficient manner, and allow for innovation to be incorporated at a pace that keeps up with the dynamic flow of the part of the internet in which we reside. To help us plan for this summit, we'd like your suggestions for what you think might be important for us to talk about.  We only have two or three days together so we can't cover everything, but we'd like to know what's on your mind all the same whether you are a user, a developer, a designer or a site administrator.  If you have a suggestion, please post them using this form.

Finally, we must thanks the sponsors for this event which have offset the major costs that would otherwise have been bourn by PLT members personally.  Thanks go to eBay, Microsoft and Kontent Design for allowing us to make this event possible.

In an effort to maintain the Board's effectiveness during its search for a new Treasurer, the Board of Open Source Matters, Inc. (OSM), on the 10th of August 2010, appointed Steve Burge as Acting Treasurer of the organization, for a period ending no later than November 1, 2010 or until a new Treasurer has been elected, appointed or qualified, whichever comes first.

The Acting Treasurer shall have all the abilities and privileges of the Treasurer, but is only expected to provide his services in a limited role during this interim period.

The OSM board wishes to express thanks to Steve for assisting in this important role.

In May, Brad Baker started this blog series with a roundup of informative reports submitted from each CWG team on the Community Workgroup Google Group. 

Today we continue the series with a round up the team reports from July and I also encourage you to check out the June reports, if you have not already had the chance to do so.

Carry on reading for some incredible news and stats from the hard working teams within the CWG.

The Community Leadership Team has created a relief system for the backlog of Joomla User Group (JUG) submissions and correspondence. We would like your help to make this work though.

As of right now, if you are on the waiting list of people who have not heard back about a JUG submission, We have a new form that we ask you to fill out at your earliest convenience.

Resubmit your application using  JUG Submission Form

We know you are tired of forms!  So are we.  For now though this is only a stop gap solution while we work on something more permanent and efficient for all.  We feel this new form can be processed on our end much faster than the current system.

We would appreciate any feedback you have to offer in the JUGs People.Joomla group.

Thank you for your patience! Joomla User Groups make up a valuable component of our community. We appreciate your continued efforts and we look forward to working with you as we resolve this issue as quickly and effectively as possible.

On behalf of the Community Leadership Team, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Sandra Warren and Matt Lipscomb as our newest members.

Sandra has been instrumental in organizing a brand new team to help with the beta launch of People Site.  As co-admin, her efforts have helped steer our community into new territory here on joomla.org and she's done a tremendous job of it.  Sandra and her team are now hard at work getting the People Site ready for its upcoming Official Launch.

Matt currently works on various Community Workgroup teams including the Site Showcase, Support Forums, JCM and the JRD.  He does an outstanding job in all.  Some of Matt’s more recent contributions include a discussion with the community to find ways to make JRD inclusion easier and the Joomla! Weekly Challenge which encourages people to contribute in various ways to the project and global community.

We think Sandra and Matt will be excellent additions to our team and we thank them for taking on this added role to their current positions in the project.

Sandra, Matt... Welcome!

I'm pleased to announce that the OSM Board has new leaders filling critical roles in our organization.

During the past few months, I've spearheaded a project inside Open Source Matters (OSM) to delineate clear roles and responsibilities for a few important positions within our organization.  The goal of this project was to enable our team to more effectively match board members' talents with positions that set them up for success and provided clear objectives and responsibilities.  By putting this project into action, Board members are able to clearly understand what is expected of them within each position, as well as measure their success more objectively with metrics developed by them and their fellow teammates.

This project also provides the Board an opportunity to have a written understanding of the scope these positions.  In the professionalizing of our Board, I strongly believe that actually writing down these positions roles and responsibilities are key to us achieving our goals, and keeping our sanity.  I've even gone as far as to tell candidates for Board positions that one of their key goals should be to find ways to make themselves "obsolete", or in other words, ensure that when it's time for them to hand over their leadership position to another colleague, the new leader can focus on innovation rather than needing to rebuild systems from scratch.

You probably didn't notice, but recently we have republished the "Support Joomla!" page. We also have a new "Support Joomla!" module for anyone to use. This is exciting because for the past several years we have not been able to ask the Joomla! Community for financial support. What happened?

As I mentioned back in February, at the advice of our attorneys, and with a lot of reflection, the board of Open Source Matters (OSM)  had been exploring the possibility of "correcting" its corporate charter. Those corrections have now been made, and this post will explain what that means. The specific changes could not be discussed previously because they were legal advice, but now we can do so. There are complicated legal and financial reasons for making these changes which I am going to try to explain in this post.   It will be a little heavy going, so before I start let me stress the two main points:

• OSM will always remain a not for profit organization.
• This change will allow OSM to ask for money for support of the Joomla! Project.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Mooing Forward With Joomla! 1.5
  

  Since the release of Mootools 1.2, we have found ourselves facing a rather difficult question - what do you do with the 1.5 core?  Unfortunately, the changes that came in Mootools 1.2 were significant enough that backwards compatibility with Mootools 1.1 was a difficult task.  I like to compare it to the difference between Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5.  We did a lot of house cleaning and made our framework much smoother and much cleaner.

  Such is the case for Mootools 1.1 and Mootools 1.2.  The new Mootools represents a significant step forward.

  As a result, Joomla! developers have found themselves in a difficult position. Do you use the outdated version of Mootools, thereby reducing compatibility issues and making life easier for users, or do you use the new version and attempt one of a variety methods of overriding the core framework.

  We hope to change all of that in the near future.

  As has been previously mentioned, it is our plan to give Joomla! 1.5 an upgrade to Mootools 1.2.  This will allow developers to take advantage of the improvements that this new version offers and to write code that will endure into the future.

  We have set a target release date of July 15, 2010 for Joomla! 1.5 with Mootools 1.2.

  The Gory Details

  I previously released an upgrade plugin for people to test out which replaced the core JHtmlBehavior class. This plugin implemented the JHtmlBehavior::framework method that has been added in trunk. The Mootools upgrade that will be included with Joomla! 1.5 will follow along in this direction.

  After the 1.5 update is uploaded, the plugin will be installed the first time an administrator logs into the administrator panel.  They will also be presented with a message asking them if they would like to enable the plugin. Once the plugin is enabled the site will then be using Mootools 1.2.

  When the plugin is enabled whenever the framework Mootools library is loaded Mootools 1.2 will be loaded with the compatibility layer.

  The hope is that even with the upgrade activated, there will be no negative impact on sites. However, in the event that the upgrade does cause problems, it will be easy for administrators to disable the plugin and restore their site to the previous state.

  We're excited about this development and are grateful to the folks at Mootools who have worked with us to provide a compatibility layer that could make this possible.

  The code is a work in progress. If you would like to check it out you are free to check it out from http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/branches/mt12.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Joomla! Community Workgroup May 2010 Report
  

  Recently the Joomla Community Workgroup came up with an idea to share just how much work is being done with the wider community by way of a monthly team report. You can see the source of the combined report I have compiled below here.

  It's an incredible snapshot of the 100's of volunteers working on this part of the Joomla Project. Thanks must also to go to the support OSM ( www.opensourcematters.org ) gives to our project, as well as the Joomla Production Workgroup.

  Read on for the full report, it's amazing!

  
  

  
  
  
  
• What is 'contributing' to an Open Source Project? Take three
  

  Back in Nov 2006, I wrote the following blog post: What is 'contributing' to an Open Source Project?

  Every so often I like to take a look at how we are now doing, in comparision to how we have been doing in the past. Having taken the time to do so recently, I'm really encouraged, and hopefully as a follow up in my series, I hope you'll benefit for reflecting with me, if you've been around for a while, or if you're only new, joining me and contributing.

  Let me start with my conclusion I wrote back then:

  There is no utopia. No one, and no project, is perfect. Do we have faults, yes, some of them may be more important to you than they are to me, however the fact remains, if you are here for Joomla, the structure is already in place (maybe not ideal, or perfect) for your contribution to be accepted.

  From my point of view, this still stands as true today as it was almost 4 years ago when I first wrote this. However, what I'm most encouraged about is the progress we have made in being able to accept the many and varied contributions of so many people. In some ways our structure has also improved to facilitate this. Let's dig a little deeper into this now.

  What is contributing to an Open Source Project?

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Joomla! 1.6 help screens: Call for help
  

  With the release of Joomla! 1.6 beta 1 looming large, the time has come to start ramping up the user documentation effort in anticipation of that milestone.  One of our highest priority goals is to have a complete set of up-to-date help screens available by the time 1.6 goes stable and preferably before then so that the translation teams have time to do their work too.  To help us achieve that goal I'm looking for volunteers to form a small team that can work to write the new help screens.  This is a perfect opportunity for those of a less technical bent to make a significant contribution to the Joomla! project.
  
  The trunk now includes a modified help system that pulls help screens from the wiki at http://docs.joomla.org.  This is fully functional and you can see it action by installing the latest SVN code or one of the nightly builds.  But right now, clicking on the administrator toolbar help buttons will bring up only holding pages, most of which pull the old Joomla! 1.5 help screens as a temporary measure.
  
  There is a complete list of the Joomla! 1.6 help screens here: http://docs.joomla/org/Help16:Help_screens and this also acts as a control sheet showing progress towards our goal of having all the help screens completed by the time 1.6 goes stable.  As you can see, there are around 50 screens to be completed.  At the present time most of them are "transclusions" of the old 1.5 help screens; that is to say, they contain a simple one-line statement that pulls in the old content.  Every single one of these will need to be replaced with new content that covers 1.6 specifically.  This is not as daunting as it might at first appear; there is much in the 1.5 help screens that can be carried over into the 1.6 screens.
  
  So, I'm looking for people who are willing and able to carry out one or more of the following tasks:

  • write new help screens, based on the original 1.5 help screens.  You don't need to have deep knowledge of 1.6 to do this, but a willingness to learn is essential.  Familiarity with wiki syntax is helpful, but not essential as everything you need to know about the wiki can be learned in about 10 minutes.
  • create screenshots of all the required elements and upload them using the wiki image naming conventions.  On some images you will need to use some kind of annotation tool to highlight specific aspects of an image, so you will need to be familiar with image editing tools with this capability.
  • proofread the help screens, correcting typographical and grammatical errors and ensuring that they actually make sense!
  • monitor changes to 1.6 as they occur and be able to flag where changes to the help files are needed.  There will doubtless be changes to the user interface during the process of moving from beta to stable and we don't want to miss anything!

  This is a great opportunity for non-developers to contribute something really important to the project.  If you'd like to get involved then please contact me at chris.davenport@joomla.org and we can get started straight away.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Welcome Paul!
  

  The Community Leadership Team is pleased to announce that Paul Orwig has accepted our invitation to join the team.

  Paul has already demonstrated great leader skills in his various volunter roles as webmaster of the joomla! community website and as lead person of the new Magazine, and we all look forward to working closer with him.

  Welcome to the team!

   

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears
  

  The success of any software release in an Open Source project depends on people getting involved, and Joomla! 1.6 is no exception. As we get closer to a stable Joomla! 1.6 release I wanted to take a moment and go over the timeline to stable and how you can play a part in making it better, faster.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Microsoft signs the Joomla! Contributor Agreement
  

  Microsoft has signed the JCA (Joomla! Contributor Agreement), and we've got some of their code in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk. There, I said it. It feels like it should be so much more doesn't it? Don't worry, I won't end the blog post there.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Ask The Joomla! Team
  

  As you may know the Joomla leadership teams have been working hard to increase our transparency and open our disussions and decision processes. We hope we're moving in the right direction and you as a community sent a lot of constructive feedback from the "Better Communication With the Joomla Community" blog post.
  
  Today we announce the "Ask the Joomla Team" communication channel.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Request for Comment: Joomla! Contributor Agreement
  

  There are some pretty exciting changes coming with regard to how we work on Joomla!.  In the near future we are going to be allowing developers to register accounts via our Joomla! Developer Network site and be given access to commit code to our subversion repositories with those accounts.  We will be keeping the trunk and release sections of our repository secured for trusted maintainers, but anyone will be able to create and work in branches so that more people can be working collaboratively on making Joomla! better.

  While these changes are a fantastic step towards facilitating access to the core software, they also potentially expose the project to some problems.  Historically, gaining commit access to the core repository has come with earning the trust and favor of the existing committers.  This has kept the group relatively small, and given us all good assurances that the people who are committing code understand the ramifications, both legal and social, of having that privilege.  By opening up to self-registration we are losing some of that assurance, so we felt it was important to formalize the terms under which we accept contributions to our project repositories.  

  I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with OSM, the Production Leadership Team, and obviously OSM’s attorneys to come up with what we believe to be a great solution to these challenges: the Joomla! Contributor Agreement (JCA).  The JCA is based on the Sun Contributor Agreement, version 1.5, by Sun Microsystems, but obviously reworked for our purposes.  My hope is that it will make expectations for both the contributor and the Joomla! project more clear as we move into the future.  What I am presenting here today are three draft documents, and I am asking for your feedback.

  
  

  
  
  
  
• Welcome Wendy and Ole!
  

  The Joomla Community Leadership Team is proud to announce the addition of two new members.

  Wendy Robinson is currently on the OSM board. She will be leaving OSM when her term is up in February.

  Ole Ottosen was already on the Production Leadership Team, but found that most of the work he was doing was for the community side of the project. Ole's move from the Production Leadership Team to the Community Leadership Team is effective immediately.

  With a new year upon us, we welcome both Wendy and Ole to the team.