PICnet Blog

It’s early in the morning here in NYC, and just as I’m getting to board the train back to PICnet for my annual address to the company, I see the following good news on the Joomla! Web site:  Joomla 1.5 is stable!

What an effort it’s been.  With a complete rewrite of the code base, making it sleeker and more elegant for developers and users alike, Joomla! 1.5 comes out of the door with a bang today.

While I’ve got to run to the train station this morning, I’m expecting a long day of celebrations ahead for everyone in the community.  Congratulations everyone, especially Louis and Johan, whose vision helped propel the code base to be what it is today.  Also, big thanks to PICnetter Kevin Devine, who’s work in the past few months in bug squashing has lead to many great strides forward in the 1.5 trunk.
More details coming soon!

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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I don’t know about you, but I got MooTools fever. I love it. It has turned me on to Javascript. To make matters worse, there are some great 3rd party developers making some really cool stuff. Like Calendar. It is a “Javascript class that adds accessible and unobtrusive date-pickers to your form elements”. All done in MooTools. Wow, now that is incredible! Could we possibly see it override or take the place of the current Joomla 1.5 JS Calendar?

Many of our organizations are using Non-Profit Soapbox for their CMS, and when doing so also elect to utilize Google Apps for their email services. This means they receive two great tools: a content management system and an email administration system. Unfortunately, it also means that they have to utilize two different systems to manage these functionalities.

What if we could bridge that gap? What if we could provide an administrative control panel for Google Apps within the Joomla administrator?

After a point in the right direction by a good friend, it seems like this could become a reality. Google provides rather detailed PHP API for their provisioning system, including even an API for the Zend Google Data Client Library to access the Provisioning API functionality.

Using the API, one could build remote functionalities such as:

• managing user accounts
• managing nicknames
• creating email lists

Anyone built on top of this yet?

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The Joomla! core team has done an amazing amount of work over the past 2 years to bring Joomla! 1.5 to life. This group of dedicated developers have given large portions of their daily lives to make Joomla! a powerful tool to empower millions of individuals around the world.

On this Thanksgiving Day, there’s no better time for the Joomla! community to show our thanks and give back.

Last week I wrote a blog posting about how the community can help get Joomla 1.5 out the door. Now just a week later, we’ve got a plan of action. On the weekend of December 8 and 9, the US Joomla! community will have an opportunity to come together in New York, Washington, and California for the first ever Pizza, Bugs, and Fun (PBF) bug squashing event!

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As big supporters of the Joomla framework, we’re extremely excited to see Joomla 1.5 go out the door. Of course, with any application development project, that unfortunate 80/20 rule comes into effect and finds us spinning our wheels in the mud. We at PICnet would like to see an end to that, and are beginning to ruminate on bug hunting ideas that can pull in a community effort to step-up the pace of the action.

Be it a bounty, paid development, or a few key code sprints, we want to see the 1.5 bugs squashed and are willing to help organize the next steps to seeing it happen. We’re looking to the community for examples of other homestretch coding exercises that have helped push code out the door in the open source community, and are interested in seeing how this process can be managed.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more, but the challenge is out there: let’s squash these 1.5 bugs with the help of key stakeholders and developers in our Joomlasphere.

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.

With the strong debate in the Joomla world regarding the GPL, I’ve learned a lot about it. Just when I’m starting to get a handle on it, the Free Software Foundation officially announced the release of the General Public License v3 today.

“Since we founded the free software movement, over 23 years ago, the free software community has developed thousands of useful programs that respect the user’s freedom. The programs are in the GNU/Linux operating system, as well as personal computers, telephones, Internet servers, and more. Most of these programs use the GNU GPL to guarantee every user the freedom to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute the program,” said Richard Stallman, founder and president of the FSF.

Now the question is, what will the adoption rate of this new license?

More coverage:

• GPL v3 to be released today (OpenSourceCommunity.org)
• Over 5500 Projects Slated to Adopt GPL 3
• GPL v3 due Friday — don’t trip over the lawyers at the Apple Store

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.