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?

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.

Gotta love the community. A group of developers are putting their heads together to create an excellent tutorial on the new Joomla 1.5 MVC (model, view, controller) structure and how to build a component using MVC and the new Joomla libraries. This is a great resource for all you developers out there. Hope to see some good components come out in the future because of this.

In our efforts to go beyond just the nuts and bolts of bridging the gap between CRM and CMS applications, PICnet has kicked off our community building effort for Joomla and Salesforce.com users. We’re a bunch of regular matchmakers.

Yesterday I had great meeting with Meghan Nesbit of the Salesforce.com Foundation at their offices in downtown SF. We chatted about a variety of items, including the impact that Salesforce is having in the non-profit community, with well more than 1,000 licenses of their non-profit version of Salesforce distributed for free to organizations across the US. Even better, these non-profit users get the same standard support paying Salesforce corporate users receive.

I also learned about a vibrant non-profit Salesforce user community that bubbles up in three different places:

• Non-Profit Salesforce.com Practioners Google group
• Non-Profit forums at Salesforce.com
• Twice a month conference call with non-profit practitioners

When I had a chance to demo what we’ve already put together for J!Salesforce, Meghan seemed pretty happy with the results, and seemed especially in tune with some of the trickiness to the integration on items such as multi-select boxes. Her comments were a nice pat on the back of Kevin’s tireless work over the past few weeks, and sparked a fire under our feet to keep the ball rolling.

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Someone had to step up and do it, so PICnet is doing it. We’re bringing a fully connected Salesforce.com component to the Joomla community, and should have a beta version ready for download by the middle of January 2007.

The goal here is to build a strong framework that future developers (including ourselves in our Non-Profit Soapbox system) can continue to extend. For instance, our J!Salesforce component will allow Joomla site visitors to input their contact information in Salesforce through Joomla, using a simple form. Then, when a visitor returns to the Web site, they can login using the Joomla login form, be authenticated against Salesforce.com, and then be able to edit their contact information in Salesforce securely.

Pretty darn powerful.

We’re proud to be the first ones developing this connection for the Joomla community, and look forward to working with the Salesforce Foundation to help spread the good word to our non-profit users. Don’t worry business users, we’ve got something in store for you too.

We should be rolling out a roadmap to the development of this component, as well as add-ons for J!Salesforce at the end of December 2006. What would be nice is to hear from the community as to what users and developers would like to have this integration piece do for them, so we can make sure we’re meeting the needs of the community.

[Digg this story]

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