PICnet Blog

In the world of CRM systems, we’ve played with them all. Internally, we’re fans of the SugarCRM tool for a variety of reasons, none of which I’ll even try to explain here. Well, I will point out one: SugarCRM 5 finally includes an easy to use module builder (something our friends in the Salesforce.com world have had for a while now).

This is the holy grail of online CRM systems which kept organizations like PICnet in the world of offline databases like FileMaker Pro. With our internal tracking of domain names, databases, pipeline and sales, server configurations, etc, we needed something that could pool all this data into one place.

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I must admit, when it comes to development processes, I’m an old fashioned pseudo waterfall procedure kind of guy. I know what you’re thinking: this guy needs to drink the agile programming, extreme programming, pair programming Kool-Aid.

Well, with the help of our development department, I’m in full test-driven development therapy (thanks Chris and Mark). Even better, I’m dragging one of our project managers, Pradeep, along for the ride.

From our friends at Wikipedia: “Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development technique consisting of short iterations where new test cases covering the desired improvement or new functionality are written first, then the production code necessary to pass the tests is implemented, and finally the software is refactored to accommodate changes.”

Gulp. Can management and test-driven development live in harmony?
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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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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.

In what has been one of the most demanding legal and technical thought processes I’ve seen outside a courtroom (before Paris went to jail), the Joomla core team and the Open Source Matters board of directors have unanimously agreed today that Joomla will remain under the General Public License (GPL). Speaking for this writer, I truly believe this will aid in the growth of the Joomla ecosystem and the open source ecosystem as a whole.

The words used by the core team will be parsed, snipped, and likely taken out of context in the days to come, but reading the treatsie from the Joomla.org Web site is a lesson in open source community building and professional diplomacy.

Starting with, “Joomla! is moving to ensure the future of the project by committing to compliance with the GNU/GPL licence,” the letter to the community includes the following sections:

1. Slow and steady. This will be the path to which the community will lead in becoming more GPL compliant.
2. We’re unique. For a community this large, with such a unique history, we’re not going to find quick solutions.
3. Joomla! Web sites (joomla.org sites) will be made compliant with the GPL. Teach by setting the example.
4. Joomla! will ask its huge community to voluntarily become more compliant with the GPL license.
5. The Joomla! community will be committed to providing education in guiding better GPL compliance. Provide aid, not hand slaps.

When a community grows to this size, we all must look inward to see where our core values will lead us. In this case, the entire core team and OSM have spoken in unison, and in this project’s case, the values include compliance with the GPL.

Some people have argued that this is a “strict interpretation” of the GPL. I’m not sure what they mean, however, as this simply is the way the GPL was written. In fact, those providing legal guidance to our community on this issue, the Software Freedom Law Center, are the people that helped write the GPL.

What is left now is to see the reactions of the commercial developers in the community (of which PICnet is one). There have been strong voices on the opinions of the subject, even from Joomla developers that have been around for a long time. PICnet will do its best to lead by example, and in the coming months will be unveiling new options for organizations to acquire GPL’d Joomla! extensions.

I know that one concern that many third party commercial developers have is what they consider a veiled threat of legal action against them for violating the GPL by distributing non-GPL compliant Joomla! extensions. A quote from the forums today from core team member Louis sums up his position quite nicely:

“Lets cut the crap, you guys think that one of us intends to sue you for violating the GNU GPL? It would be a hell of a lot easier for us to just get a band of open source developers together to recreate your project and render it useless. That would take no legal fees, save us time and in the end benefit the community a hell of a lot more than scaremongering and postulating on the ridiculous notion that we are out to get someone. We are open source geeks…peaceful people.”
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,163492.msg861430.html#msg861430

What is ironic about the entire process, however, is that we’re talking about keeping the same license that is used in the wildly popular 1.0.x series. I know that I personally will be aiding in the effort to help better understand what GPL compliant business models can be made, especially in a community whose leadership has spoke so strongly today in support of it.

This is Day 1. I have a feeling our beloved GPL thread will be growing well beyond its 56 pages by tomorrow at dawn.