PICnet Blog

As the sun sets on most of the bug squashing locations this afternoon, we in San Francisco are also winding down on what has been a tremendous community effort. In less than 48 hours, developers and testers around the globe have squashed more Joomla 1.5 bugs than we ever could have imagined.

What some thought would normally take 4 weeks was completed in just two days.

In San Francisco, we had a blast. Today brought us two additional community members, including Steve Reichgut (all the way from Tracy) and Ron Severdia. Their efforts brought our daily total of seven SF community members doing their best to help get 1.5 out the door. Helped by a good dosage of snacks provided graciously by Debbie, freshly brewed coffee, and a nice view of the SF bay from the PICnet SF corner window, developers went to town slaying the bugs.

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It’s been a whirlwind on our first day of Joomla Pizza, Bugs, and Fun here. We’ve got three US cities connected, including San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York all bringing their best to join the Joomla fun. I had the joy of flying cross-country last night, and now am blogging for you live from the PICnet SF office where we’re hosting 6 of us Joomla bug crunchers.The day started off very smoothly, with DC and NY going online at 10am. Cold weather ain’t stopping us! We setup an IRC room for the main chat, and a secondary Skype chat room for us IRC delinquents. After realizing that we had the power to kick out the jams, we figured out that we needed to have a plan of attack for squashing these suckers effectively.

Wilco stepped up to the mic and called from the NY location to the DC location, and gave us some marching orders. In general, our goal was to make sure that we weren’t duplicating efforts on the patches. So, we created a Google doc, which allowed people to post which bug artefact they were working on, and then notify Wilco of the start of their work.

So far, things have gone much more smoothly than I had ever imagined. Big thanks to the likes of Wilco, Elin, Rob, Kenneth, and Louis for their long travels to be on the scene to give guidance to the community as we patch away. Even bigger props to the 39 community members around the world that have taken time from their Saturdays to make this a reality. And finally, to my fellow PICnetters, thank you for the donation of your time to make sure we’re rocking smoothly here.

More updates coming throughout the day! Photos after the jump.

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In what will be the beginning of a tidal shift in the Joomla community, Joomla 1.5 has reached the release candidate stage today with a simultaneous announcement at Joomla events in the US and Germany. In technology terms, a release candidate essentially means that unless fatal bugs or flaws are found, the software is fast-tracked into preparation for full stable release.

As one of the lead coordinators of the release, Wilco Jansens said, “We hope to go to RC2 (Release Candidate Two) early August and Stable should follow very quickly after. While working in the engine room over recent weeks, we knew we were on the brink of something great. Let the fireworks begin.”

At PICnet, our development team has recently hammering away at contributing patches to the Joomla 1.5 trunk, and we’re excited to see with our insight into the release project the professionalism and speed at which the Joomla Quality and Testing work group and core team have been squashing bugs. Joomla 1.5 will bring huge benefits in both efficiency and feature richness to our non-profit community, especially our Non-Profit Soapbox clients.

I remember one of the first conversations I had with Laura Quinn of Idealware a few years ago regarding her great idea for an online resource and clearinghouse of high-level technology information, and told her that I thought it would be a hit. Little did I know that I’d get the chance to play a recurring role of supporting actor in the open source content management systems (CMS) webinars, which seem to be quite popular.

On Thursday, June 21, from 1-2:30pm ET, I’ll be showcasing Joomla alongside my fellow open source CMS friends David Geilhufe (of the Drupal community) and Patrick Shaw (of the Plone community). All of our past Webinars have been very well attended, and actually helped some organizations choose Joomla! in the past.

This time, Laura’s asked us to focus a little more on the differences that users can find out of the box between these three systems, so I’ll likely be focusing on Joomla’s administrative UI, large community, and some other thoughts I have up my sleeve. Interested in attending? Register here, and learn more here.

In an effort to help spread the word of open source content management systems (CMS) and constituent relationship management systems (CRM), I was asked to give a talk at OneWorld on March 28, 2007 to the OneWorld Peer Learning Exchange. Roshani Kothari from OneWorld was gracious enough to write up some great notes on it (see below) as well as post a podcast of this.

Listen to the MP3 of the talk

Thanks to Roshani for her hard work to make these OneWorld Peer Learning Exchanges occur, and to my co-presenters Alan Rosenblatt and Guy Stevens for their contributions.

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When you do great work, and put your full effort and heart into your clients’ projects, it’s nice to be recognized for those efforts. Today, the Congressional Management Foundation awarded Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Web site the coveted Golden Mouse award, the highest honor a congressional office can receive for outstanding Web communications.

Incredible hard work went into the effort, especially by Congresswoman Maloney’s lead Web site manager Anna Cielinski, who provided countless days and long nights into making the site a success.

From the Congressional Management Foundation:

“Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney’s Web site exemplifies how to use advances in technology and the Internet to better serve the growing number of constituents that are online. The content is comprehensive and cross-referenced. The wealth of features provides users with a sense of the work the Representative does, her accomplishments, and the services she provides.”

In addition to this, another PICnet client, Congressman Ed Markey, won a Bronze Mouse award, placing it in the top 30 congressional Web sites.

Congratulations to both offices, and their PICnetters, on a job well done!

You can read the 2006 Gold Mouse Report: Recognizing the Best Web Sites on Capitol Hill (PDF - 5MB) in its entirety to learn more about best practices for offices on the Hill.

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece called Islands and bridges: why Soapbox will lead the way to CRM and CMS integration for non-profits, where I detailed our vision on breaking down the walls between important technology silos in the non-profit community.

At that time, we spoke only about content management systems (CMSes) and constituent relationship management (CRMs), and while feedback on the blog was quiet, offline we got an earful.

A full three months have passed since then, and I think it’s about time to open the lid on how our bridge engineers are laying down the first strong links between these islands. Especially with postings like that of Allan Benamer from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, where he writes about his favorite stack of stacks, it made me think a response to his post might be in order.

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During the Web development process, one of the most important phases of work is the information architecture. In laymen’s terms, the outline of the site. Of course, this phase doesn’t get the glory of the more glamorous work, like design mockups and development iterations.

One reason why this phase is often lower on organization’s radars is that it’s just not that much fun. It seems, however, that we might have a contender that could make this process a lot more, well, bubbly.

Bubbl.us is a new Web based mind-mapping tool that we think might have some traction in the Web development world. The goal is to make it easy to develop bubble-like outlines of systems, with an easy to use interface. The system is still a little buggy, but it’s just in beta, as is everything else these days. Lots of Flash makes me worry a little bit about its extendability (would like it if you could export these mind-maps into text documents).

Definitely worth a look.

We PICnetters use Basecamp for project management and when we learned they had released an API and saw the interesting things people were doing with it, we thought, “hey let’s integrate”. Not because it’s cool (though the closer we get to Web 2.0 tools, the cooler we all seem here around the office), but because we saw a need, at least internally, for some extended functionality: easy time tracking and reporting.

Basecamp allows time tracking and it is very nice when checking off a task to record how many hours you spent getting it done. But sometimes we get so engrossed in our work we forget when we started. So, we built a sort of stop-watch application which allows us to punch-in, punch-out, write up a description then send it off to Basecamp.

Another pet peeve of ours is when we run over the number of hours we’ve dedicated to a project, and with several people contributing time to a project that can happen easily if the time isn’t closely monitored. So next up on the integration effort is to develop a warning system which will alert project managers when we’re nearing that limit.

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In what will likely be the email heard round the NPO tech world, we just received a partner email from GetActive that states the following announcement:  Convio is buying GetActive.

While it’s too early to understand the ramifications of this for the companies’ clients and the sector as a whole, I’m rather confident that this will likely be just the beginning of a year of mergers and acquisitions in the sector.

From the letter:

I’m writing to share the exciting news that GetActive is to be acquired by Convio, Inc. This is a significant milestone for the nonprofit sector, our company, and our product. But most important of all, this is great news for our partners and clients.

I predicted the consolidation of the marketplace last year, but I didn’t think these two big hitters would be the happy couple we see today.

See the full letter after the jump.

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