General News
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We are pleased to announce Google has accepted Joomla!'s application to participate in the 2008 Google Summer of Code (SoC) program. This is Joomla!'s fourth season and we are eager to welcome another group of contributors with fresh ideas.
With the Summer of Code, Google sets up a win-win situation for students and open source projects. Instead of flipping burgers during summer break, talented student developers can do what they love and write great code in exchange for a $4,500 USD stipend. Even open source projects benefit with improvements to the code base and a $500 USD stipend per participant.
Perhaps the most important benefit is the long term involvement that can result. Both Nur Aini Rakhmawati and Hannes Papenberg were invited to join the Joomla! Development Team after successful SoC projects.
If you are a student interested in participating, consider Joomla!
Read more: Joomla! Announces Participation in Google's Summer of Code 2008 Program
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The Joomla! community congratulates the Drupal community on their release of Drupal 6.0. It is a great accomplishment and shows the strength and creativity of their free and open source community. Their hard work has paid off and again shown the power of open source collaboration to produce great software. We are especially thrilled for the many Drupal community members who we have gotten to know, most recently when both projects participated in the Google GHOP Contest .
Drupal like Joomla! makes it possible for millions of people to be creators of rich and complex web content without having to be coders. We celebrate Drupal's achievement in this, just as we celebrated our release of Joomla! 1.5.
Well done Drupal, and congratulations.
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The Google Highly Open Participation Contest for pre-university students (high school and secondary school students) aimed at encouraging young people to participate in open source projects. Joomla! is proud to have been invited to join with nine other open source organisations for this pilot program. Tomasz DobrzyDski was unanimously selected as Joomla!'s 2008 Grand Prize Winner of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Tomasz completed seven tasks during the competition.
- Translate part of the Installation Manual to a non-English Language - forum thread
- Create a Blog Entry Date Calendar Icon Plugin for Joomla! v 1.5 - forum thread
- Create a Joomla! v 1.5 Plugin to update Twitter status with article title when published - forum thread
- Carry out GHOP unit test on the Joomla1 1.5 Test Package for the Front Page Manager - forum thread
- Carry out GHOP unit test on the Joomla1 1.5 Test Package: Template Manager - forum thread
- Carry out GHOP unit test on the Joomla1 1.5 Test Package: Menu Manager - forum thread
- Implement Avatar/Gravatars for Joomla! v 1.5 - forum thread
Read more: Google Highly Open Participation Contest WInner Announced
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One of the most important ways an open source community interacts is by helping one another. This weekend gives everyone in the Joomla! community a fun new way to do just that. The first world-wide documentation camp for the Joomla! project kicks off tomorrow, Saturday 19th January 2008 and will continue all the way through Monday evening.
What is a documentation camp?
Good question. With the release of Joomla! 1.5 right around the corner, our community has a big need for new documentation on nearly every aspect of Joomla!. In a sentence this documentation camp is a lot of community members working together over the course of a weekend to write up a massive amount of documentation for the soon to be released Joomla! 1.5. We have a very large wishlist of tasks to be accomplished ready and waiting for anyone and everyone who can participate. To make everyone's life easy we have split off tasks into bite-sized items so that no one has to dedicate more time than he or she can afford during the event.
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Joomla! is free software. Anyone can use it, modify it, add to it, study it, extend it, or patch it. Anyone can share or sell what they have done with Joomla! so long as what they distribute is also free in these same ways.
To some, free software sounds suspiciously radical and certainly idealistic. In recent weeks, we have seen just how powerful an approach it is. Nearly 40 development tasks were selected by 25 Joomla! contestants in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. For these teens, the ability to study how Joomla! works and adapt the code for their own purposes meant learning to be stronger developers technically as well as in terms of working as part of a community. During the same period, the community--including some of those same students-- has come together to work on Joomla! 1.5, making a RC4 a reality and continuing to make strong progress since then.
We have seen that "there are good reasons why free software tends to be of high quality. One reason is that free software gets the whole community involved in working together to fix problems. Users not only report bugs, they even fix bugs and send in fixes. Users work together, conversing by email, to get to the bottom of a problem and make the software work trouble-free." (https://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.html)