We are back … in a new formula. And this time the week in review posts are here to stay ! From now on the week in reviews will be a joint effort between all the working group coordinators. This means I won’t need to hunt down the information anymore. Lucky me. Instead the coordinators will report about their activities on a bi-weekly basis and i’ll summarize it into a nice blog for all of you to enjoy. Be warned the first one is a big one …

Joomla! event news

In the last three months local Joomla! communities have been flurishing, we saw a multitude of different events organised all over the world where people joined to meet each other, have some fun and offcourse talk about their favorite CMS. A small rundown of the Joomla! buzz :

• The active members of the Hungarian Joomla! Forum met in Budapest for their first Joomla! party
• The Italian community held their first meetup at the OpenEXP event.
• The Swedish community gathered in Västerås 6-7th of October 2006, for to meet and discuss the continuation of the Joomla! community in Sweden.
• The Greek Joomla Team presented Joomla! at DTE. The Greek Digital Expo is the former COMDEX and took place from 20 October till 22 October.

We were also present on the LinuxWorld in San Fransisco and London, Systems in Germany and EuroOSCON in Brussels.

Working group news

Development working group

Past weeks the development working group had two main focussed areas thet were assigned to. In week 42 the complete development working groups ( 1.0 and 1.5 teams) were put onto the tracker for 1.0.12 development trying to fix all reported artifacts, currently almost all artifacts are assigned and we are nearing the completion on the 1.0.12 version. Before we put 1.0.12 out, the quality and testing working group will do extensive (and massive) testing to check if there is no work left for this release.

After we released the 1.5-beta on 12 october we are quite busy processing all feedback that is put into the forum. As with all beta releases the tracker of 1.5 looks massive, but the 1.5 team will speed up work upcomming weeks and work on the second beta. No release date for this one is set, but we are working hard to keep up with the feedback from the community.

Sites and infrastructure working group

• Demo sites. With help from Saka, the demo sites have gone back online last week. Some additional tweaking has been done. There was some spamming going on. Brad replied with a Rambo speech email to those, and AFAIK the spamming stopped for the moment.
• New International forum. An international Latvian forum and moderator has been added. For a link with details: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,109781.0.html
• Moderator leaving. Duvien, one of the good moderators unfortunately stepped down. Brad talked Peter (Pe7er) to join the mod team to take his place.
• Stats Report . A sites stats report has been done as a blog post. Hopefully we can do a blog post about statistics at a regular interval.

Marketing and media working group

LinuxWorld UK ? we won again, well done community.

• Estimate of more than 2000 people visiting the stand … most of the 700 bookmarks now in public circulation
• Jinx’s video on YouTube has 4,306 views and holds six YouTube honours including two for most viewed
• Discussions with publishers about furthering sponsorship for future events (and other separate events).
• Prospects for the supply of venues for J! type days and resources made available for the professional presentation of Joomla in the UK.
• Discussions with Google about collaboration on its third world open source initiatives

In the coming weeks the marketing and media working group will be creating some research questions and ask the community, users, developers etc. The goal will be to have more control and flexibility to make intelligent decisions about a way forward for marketing and communications, site look and services offered. Moreover we will be able to drive priorities rather than taking pot luck.

The Joomla! project has come far in a short period of time. No other open source project has done as much as we have. We are in a place, a space, which is unique. We’re not a geek project we are fast becoming mainstream. Our branding position in the software market is envied by even commercial vendors. Like most of us we want to take the project to new heights. The tricky bit (challenge) now is to never forget the moms and pops. It’s easy to make Joomla! really, really, slick but not so easy to keep the community feeling loved. That’s the real challenge.

Quality and testing working group

1.0.12 progress has been picking up again the last couple of days. Unfortunately, it seems that it took quite a bit of teeth pulling to get people to pay attention to it again. Communication is still pretty poor in general as we have a very hard time tracking the availability of developers and testers which adds more overhead to the progress as we have to make sure the people we ask to do things will actually be around to do them. Assuming the current momentum can be maintained, we should be able to have 1.0.12 ready for release in a couple of weeks.

The recruiting effort for the Q&T group has gone pretty well. A total of 16 people have been invited to become members of the Q&T team and we received 13 positive responses so far. 3 of them have already made their way into the Q&T team (Russ, Joss, Michele). The other 10 will be visible in the near future. We tried to recruit a wide spectrum of people as far as skills and areas of expertise, interest. A few of them are professional PHP developers, one used to develop his own CMS in ASP, others are pretty new to Joomla!, some have been around for many years (Mambo days).

Overall, Rob is very satisfied with the rate of growth and I think this brings the team up to about 20 members. All in all, he hopes to get up to about 30 members by the time this is done. With those resources the Joomla! Q&T effort will be substantially more effective and efficient for future releases.

Documentation working group (user documentation)

The documentation working group has setup a special Workshop site to receive contributions to the Help screens from the community . The site has been set up now for two weeks and over 70 people have registered and have received access to edit the Help Screens.

In spite of all this effort contributions have been very minor. We get the impression that people register on the Workshop site and then they don’t come back to realy contribute.

In the coming weeks we will email those who registered to ask them if they are still interested in helping. Those who are not interested will be deleted from the Workshop access list.

Working group members Steve and Andy (the authors of the 1.0 user manual) are now beginning to work a 1.5 manual. A new sub forum has been created for the User Manual in the doc forum to receive feedback/questions/suggestions etc…

Oher Joomla! news

• Workontheinternet, released a nice rundown of Joomla! called Joomla’, easy opensource cms.
• Alfim blogged about, why he choose for Joomla!.

We will be back in two weeks … see you there.

As part of our contribution to CaFeCONF 2006 Jinx and I whipped up a videocast which was used in a broadcast last week. This was our first effort at pulling together a two-way videocast using iChat to good effect.

CaFeCONF is an event devoted to spread the word and educate about Free Software, where experts comment on a number of diverse topics concerning Free Software ? giving lectures covering different levels of expertise.

The Joomla dev team will be hosting a public IRC discussion on Wednesday 15th of November at 5PM UTC. The meeting will take place on the freenode.org IRC network in #joomla. This meeting will focus on discussions related to the 1.5 beta but should focus on beta compatibility and questions. Please join us and bring your questions!

More details about Joomla dev team IRC meetings can be found on the dev site