Joomla Announcements

Working Together

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Category: General News

Created on Tuesday, 01 January 2008 12:00

Joomla! is only possible because of the contributions of thousands of people. A community of this size requires a great deal of effort. In addition to the core team, hundreds of others participate in important ways as Translation, Development, Sites and Infrastructure, Documentation and Foundation Working Groups members. Joining a working group where your talents are best applied is only one way to contribute to Joomla!.

Community-driven activities

It is the members of this community who drive outreach. Joomla! Days, Joomla! User Groups, local support forums, conference presentations and white papers, special events and meetings, blogs, and, yes, even discussions around the office water cooler, are essential to sustain and grow Joomla! by getting the word out and recruiting talent.

Last year, Joomla! Day events were held all across the globe. Special thanks to those who made good things happen in Melbourne, Malaysia, France, Toronto, Sydney, Thailand, California, Norway, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Texas, Brasil, Hungary, Manhattan, Sweden, Finland, Serbia, Cape Town, Nigeria, and New Zealand. If you are interested in organizing a Joomla! Day where you live, learn more in the Joomla! Days board.

Joomla! User Groups are a great way to have fun and share ideas, while building a local support function. If you are interested in participating, see if there is a Joomla! User Group nearby. If not, consider starting a new user group and help others in your local community discover Joomla!.

Community members participate in countless conferences and meetings world-wide, presenting and sharing Joomla!. Events like the recent Pizza, Bugs and Fun weekend and the upcoming Joomla! Doc Camp scheduled for January 19, provide ways for community members to have fun and contribute to the project.

Friends of the project

Without a doubt, we are grateful for the generous support of others. We appreciate our friends at Google who offer the Summer of Code project and Highly Open Participation Contest. We thank the Mootools community for a fabulous Javascript framework bundled with Joomla! v 1.5. We also thank the Eclipse community for an incredible IDE and for assisting in the development of JCode. We thank Rochen for another year of professional and dependable web hosting and support of Joomla.org websites. Lastly, we thank the Software Freedom Law Center for their legal guidance and support.

Joomla! is powered by community

Eben Moglen once said, "We are moving to a world in which ... the most important activities that produce occur, not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities held together by software."

This is true for Joomla!. The combined efforts of our community this past year advanced this project in significant ways. We thank each of you for giving your time, ideas, talents, and energy to the project. This year, consider participating in new ways that use your talents to benefit the Joomla! community. Together, we can accomplish even more in 2008.

Happy New Year

Details

Category: General News

Created on Monday, 31 December 2007 20:20

Happy new year to the Joomla! Community. 2007 has been extraordinary, and 2008 is full of promise of even more. In six months Joomla! 1.5 went from Mapya (new) to Karibu (near by). Joomla! 1.0 continued its mature, steady shine with release 13, SunGlow. How did it happen?

People

Starting with Australia in January and ending in December with New Zealand , and around the world in between, Joomla! Days brought together the world wide Joomla! Community. As of April there were over 100,000 members of the Joomla! forums and in September the forums went to over a million posts.

Hard work

In 2007 those people wrote thousands of lines of code , opened 1031 bug reports (and closed all but 117 of them) , created hundreds of pages of documentation, asked and answered tens of thousands of questions, organized events around the world, and translated hundreds of text strings into a huge number of languages.

Open Source

After long and sometimes painful discussion, Joomla! reaffirmed its commitment to Open Source and GNU GPL .The power of open source and the GPL brings together all those people, to work hard and create all the pieces that make up Joomla!.

Creativity

Whether the way the Joomla! developers make the magic happen, the amazing work of high school students in the GHOP contest and college students in the Google Summer of Code , the huge number of resources that is the Joomla! Extensions Directory , or the scope of projects on Joomlacode the creativity of the Joomla! Community blossomed.

Fun

Most of all, it has been a year of fun, whether being together in person for Pizza, Bugs and Fun or a Joomla! Day, making websites we love, talking (even about the GPL) in the forums, solving problems, writing beautiful code, or taking a 1.5 RC out for a spin.

And for 2008?

Let's make it the same, but even more so. More people from more places, more creative, open source work, and even more fun.

Joomla! Doc Camp

Details

Category: General News

Created on Monday, 31 December 2007 17:21

Following on from the huge success of the Joomla! 1.5 bug squashing days, please join us for the first world-wide Joomla! 1.5 documentation days starting on 19th January 2008.  We will have tasks for everyone; coders and non-coders alike.  Our primary aim is to dramatically increase the volume of documentation available for Joomla! 1.5.

So far we have locations in Vancouver, Canada and Brussels, Belgium and we hope to confirm other locations soon.  For the latest information on locations and other arrangements, please visit the Joomla! Doc Camp wiki page .  Please note that space at these locations is limited, so don't register unless you are certain you can come.

If you can't join us in person, come join us on IRC (#joomladocs @ freenode.).  For even more fun, why not organise your own local Doc Camp by finding a space with room for you and some others to work, and getting some food in.  Keep an eye on the wiki and join in on IRC so you know what is happening elsewhere.

In the spirit of open source we will be writing collaboratively using a wiki, but there will also be opportunities to upload standalone documents in other formats.  Learning from the success of the ongoing Google Highly Open Participation Contest we will try to present small, easily-managed tasks that can be completed in a single day. 

In advance of the event itself, why not help us define the task list?  Register on the wiki and make your suggestions there or add your ideas to this forum thread.

North America

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 9AM to 6PM PST (GMT-8) Saturday 19th January 2008

(thanks to "The Network Hub" for the location and free wi-fi)

Europe 

Brussels, Belgium 10AM to 7PM CET (GMT+1) Monday 21st January 2008

(thanks to the Belgium Local Police for sponsoring the venue)