With the release of 1.6 nearly upon us, we thought it would be fitting to celebrate with something… fitted.

The Joomla! shop is exited to announce a limited-edition run of a special t-shirt that heralds the long-awaited addition of ACL. With the critical code line running down the front and a bold decree on the back, the design proclaims community excitement over ACL’s incorporation and lets you broadcast the news with style. And, you can feel proud that your purchase is supporting the release of Joomla! 1.6.

Most every day, something reminds me how remarkable the Joomla! community is. Recently, Jennifer Marriott and I announced that we needed mentors for the 2010 Google Summer of Code program. In no time at all, we had 16 volunteers, which is a fantastic start.

However, it's not quite enough. Last year, we sponsored 18 students, and we ideally would like two mentors for each student project. Do the math, and you will see that we still need more mentors.

Many people who have mentored in the past report that it was one of the most fun and rewarding of all their Joomla! experiences. GSoC gives you a chance to engage with and guide talented students and to help foster the FOSS and Joomla! development communities.

If you would like to help but aren't sure what's involved, please feel free to contact me or Jenny. You don't have to be a technical guru to be a great mentor. A big part of mentoring is helping students organize their projects and stay on track. With two mentors on a project, we can have one mentor who is more technically experienced and the other be more involved with student communication and organization. We also can draw on others in the mentoring group to help with complex technical questions.

You can find general information about GSoC and mentoring here: http://developer.joomla.org/google-summer-of-code.html.

So, think about it and then … sign up! Thanks!

 

Most every day, something reminds me how remarkable the Joomla! community is. Recently, Jennifer Marriott and I announced that we needed mentors for the 2010 Google Summer of Code program. In no time at all, we had 16 volunteers, which is a fantastic start.

 

However, it's not quite enough. Last year, we sponsored 18 students, and we ideally would like two mentors for each student project. Do the math, and you will see that we still need more mentors.

 

Many people who have mentored in the past report that it was one of the most fun and rewarding of all their Joomla! experiences. GSoC gives you a chance to engage with and guide talented students and to help foster the FOSS and Joomla! development communities.

 

If you would like to help but aren't sure what's involved, please feel free to contact me or Jenny. You don't have to be a technical guru to be a great mentor. A big part of mentoring is helping students organize their projects and stay on track. With two mentors on a project, we can have one mentor who is more technically experienced and the other be more involved with student communication and organization. We also can draw on others in the mentoring group to help with complex technical questions.

 

You can find general information about GSoC and mentoring here: http://developer.joomla.org/google-summer-of-code.html.

 

So, think about it and then … sign up! Thanks!

About this Blog

This is the second in a series of blog posts about major Joomla websites and the developers who built them. First up was Jack Bremer and the U.K. arts website theArtsDesk.com.

This week we're talking with Fotis Evangelou about the major Greek sports website Gazzetta.gr.

1) Hi Fotis. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I'm the co-founder & managing director at Komrade Ltd. I'm a Geology student dropout (!) and I've been building websites professionally for almost 10 years. I'm also the founder of JoomlaWorks, established in 2006. In late 2007, Komrade was formed and since then we're pretty fortunate to have built some of the world's top Joomla! based websites (in terms of visitor traffic) like Gazzetta.gr and TNAWrestling.com

2) What or who is Gazzetta.gr?

Gazzetta.gr is a sports news website and currently one of the top websites in Greece. It was launched early 2008 and now it averages more than 5 million visitors per month. It was actually our second project as Komrade, the first being TNAWrestling.com (2m+ visitors/month). So you can also say that we got a pretty good start as Komrade! Gazzetta.gr is run by 25+ sports journalists with many years of experience in both print and online publications. It's backed financially by a major IT related company in Greece.

3) How did the project with Gazzetta.gr come about?

The people behind Gazzetta.gr preferred to invest in an "open source" solution, having suffered from "closed source-itis" in the past, which cost them both time and money. Joomla! caught their eye as the best possible open source solution for Gazzetta.gr - especially because it had such a huge community. We were approached by them as we were already acknowledged professionals in the Joomla! community through JoomlaWorks. We sat down, discussed their needs and in 2 months the site was ready to launch.

4) Do you know why they made the decision to use Joomla?

Strong community presence was obviously key to this decision. They would not be tied to one company only for whatever reason. Another big reason was the friendliness of the Joomla! administrator interface, which was (and still is) light years ahead compared to most open source and even commercial/closed source CMSs.

5) Question from Paulo Williams: What extensions did you use in building the site?

Gazzetta.gr is now in its second version, based entirely on Joomla! 1.5 and K2. K2 is used as the main application for articles, tags, comments and more in Gazzetta.gr. It handles around 95% of all publishing/editorial related tasks.

Aside K2, we use the following publicly available extensions: Frontpage Slideshow, AllVideos, Simple Image Gallery Pro, Google Ad Manager from Joomlaworks plus JCE and Update Manager from third parties.

We also developed the following custom extensions:

• A component to administer the "news stand" area of the website
• A multi-use module for K2 that fetches content in various ways and filters as seen on the frontpage of the website and many inner pages
• A modified version of the default "cache" plugin that comes with Joomla!, which deals with page caching/performance and makes sure that the entire website is properly served from two CDNs (content distribution networks) that we use (one from Akamai, the other from Gloman/Live24.gr).

6) What major obstacles did you come across during the build?

To be honest, Gazzetta.gr v2 (the current version) was a joy building, with no real obstacles in the way. We had the right tool (K2) on the right platform (Joomla! 1.5.x), we had a great design and we had the (bad) experience from v1 (which used Joomla! v1.0.x). v1 was a much bigger pain to administer for various reasons. First of all, the core of com_content (the main content component of Joomla!) was significantly changed to reflect the templating needs of the design. So it made upgrading to the latest Joomla! 1.0.x release very hard. Upgrades to public extensions used was also an issue as there was no "overwrite/upgrade" feature in the Joomla! installer. So lots of manual work just for upgrading.

In v2 we wrote a simple migrator from WordPress to Joomla!/K2 (as v1 of Gazzetta.gr included around 9 WordPress based blogs in subfolders), moved Joomla! v1.0.x articles into K2, re-wrote the "news stand" component to an MVC-based Joomla! 1.5 component and then we started integrating everything to the new design. Moving the WordPress blogs to K2 in Joomla! 1.5 really made a difference to the editorial team as they now had to administer just one website (instead of 10 previously). Having all content in one database made it better/faster for Google to crawl content and for people to search the site. And best of all? The editors did not miss one bit of WordPress functionality as it's basically included in K2 features by default. So the work flow changed to better.

One thing we seriously took into consideration was making v2 as modular as possible, with no hacks at all in the core of Joomla! or any other core/third-party extension. If we wanted to extend the functionality of something in Joomla! (like the default "cache" plugin) we took that "something" and cloned it, then extended it. For that matter, we wanted "clean" solutions for everything and solution that we could re-use. We used Google's Ad Manager heavily, so we wrote an extension for Joomla! which we later publicly released through JoomlaWorks. We did the same thing for many of K2's now default modules. Our needs "translated" into modular solutions, which we were able to contribute back to the community.

7) Question from Jack Bremer: For those of us that haven't done it, what challenges do you face developing and coding in Greek rather than English?

In the Joomla! v1.0.x days we used to maintain a different distribution to the original build provided by joomla.org which was UTF-8 optimized. That way we could easily work with non-latin languages (like Greek) within Joomla!. Joomla! 1.5.x is now using UTF-8 by default, which was a natural step, since the CMS became so popular worldwide and had to address regional/language related issues once and for all. The use of language files also makes localization a lot easier. So developing a Greek website now is identical (as a process) to developing an English based website.

8) How do you handle 5+ million uniques per month on a Joomla site?

We use two content distribution networks (CDN) as I mentioned above. They handle 99% of the load of the website and they serve content extremely fast. If we didn't use that solution, we'd have to setup and maintain a stack of servers to simulate just a portion of the performance of a CDN (note that we use 2 CDNs because we needed to break the bandwidth costs differently - one is used for articles the other for the "news stand" area). If you're into that kind of traffic, using a CDN is the only (and most cost-effective) way.

But I'll give you a great tip here... Joomla!'s built-in "cache" plugin, which is "off" by default is simply amazing. It can "convert" Joomla! web pages into static HTML pages, thus serving the website *extremely* fast. This is a hidden gem in Joomla!. For a couple of days, we run the website with our modified version of the "cache" plugin, while being hit by thousands of users and serving a few million page views. You know what? Joomla! would hold on just fine without the CDN if Apache could handle the gazillion connections and didn't run out of memory!!! It was amazing what performance can be enjoyed from just a plugin of less than 100 code lines. Of course it's the architecture of the Joomla! framework/API that permits such a little plugin to provide this performance gain! I doubt any other open source CMS can do that!

Of course it was more cost effective to continue using the CDN. Otherwise we'd have to add new hardware. And of course the imminent addition of a Gazzetta.gr iPhone app and the release of a widgets area would demand even more bandwidth...

9) Question from James Frisen: How does K2 fit into your business model?

K2 was built to address professional needs within our industry, not just the Joomla! community. It combines the best concepts from the top open source CMSs into the flexible platform that Joomla! is. Every website we build now is based off K2. Instead of keeping this "tool" of our work for us, we decided it was best to release it to the community, so other people could benefit from it. In a little less than a year, we've managed to build a great community around it (as people realize the potential of using K2) and we constantly improve the component to address new needs and improve performance.

We don't make money directly off K2, but indirectly: we can build feature rich websites for our clients in less time compared to deploying separate extensions, with better flexibility and no hacks to core files. That means an advantage for us and our clients in using the Joomla! platform. Clients can't come up to us now and say "can we do this with Drupal or WordPress?"!! Allow me to say that Joomla! and K2 is THE killer online publishing combination. Using K2, we can build a news/magazine/portal-like site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing and more the easy way! And since K2 is extensible with additional fields to its base item form, we can create category-specific content types, e.g. article, blog post, product page, directory listing. It just makes sense!

Final thing I'd like to say about K2 is that we built it because we know and appreciate the power of the Joomla! platform. But we also know its weaknesses, which lie with content presentation and ACL (access level control). With K2 we are able to fill these gaps in and, the same way people use VirtueMart for e-shops, we believe that people can use K2 for their content related needs as well.

10) Do you have anything else special planned for Gazzetta.gr?

Version 2 saw a massive increase into traffic for the website. From 3.5+ million visitors we went to 5+ millions in just 2 months and the numbers are still increasing. I guess the goal of the editorial team is to make Gazzetta.gr the top sports news website in Greece. Our constant goal is to push the limits and try new things where possible. There are many thoughts right now to extend the current content, but I'm afraid I'm not allowed to discuss in detail. What is sure is the addition of a RESTful API into K2, which will enable us to provide various services to other websites and applications at some point in the near future.

Over to You ...

Do you know of a major or particularly interesting site that we should feature here? Email your suggestions to steve.burge@opensourcematters.org. Be sure to include:

• The website URL
• Why the site is interesting
• An email address for the developer

Next week we'll be interviewing Dan Lopez who helped build Linux.com. If you have any questions you'd like us to ask him, email steve.burge@opensourcematters.org' ); document.write( addy_text27286 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->.

About this Blog

This is the first in a series of blog posts about major Joomla websites and the developers who built them. First up is Jack Bremer and the major U.K. arts website theArtsDesk.com.

Last Novemberr the Joomla! Community in Italy put on an incredible Joomla! Day. Over 500 people attended and another 7000 watched on the live stream. I watched some of it live, and (even though I don't speak Italian) it was amazing.  Not only that, they ran it as a free event and still made enough money to contribute 750 Euros to the Joomla! Project.

 

The 2010 edition of the Google Summer of Code has been announced, and we are setting the groundwork to submit our application to participate again this year. Joomla! has participated 5 times in the Google Summer of Code and has benefited greatly by the continued support that Google offers to the FOSS world through this program. One of the best benefits for Joomla! has been the retention of students as contributors to the project long after the program ends. A lot of great work has been accomplished that has not only been of benefit for the core code base, but also extensions that have been produced and the innovation the Google Summer of Code work has inspired, every single year we have participated. Joomla! at this time is one of the most successful open source projects in its class with downloads now exceeding 15 million, and the Google Summer of Code has been integral to that success. An in-depth look at all of our past participation shows how important this program is for both Joomla! and the students that participate:

It’s likely that you’ve paid a visit to the Joomla! shop around holidays and birthdays – to gift a Joomla! book to the cousin who’s trying to expand her business, or an advanced guide to your tech-savvy co-worker – or just when you wanted to share your open-source enthusiasm by sporting a Joomla!-logo fleece.

The Joomla! shop serves not only to supply friends of Joomla! with additional resources and fashionable Joomla! accessories, but perhaps more importantly, to bring in revenue for the project. The shop is about three years old and is a relatively solid enterprise – but currently isn’t getting the love and attention that it requires to be a truly effective business.

Joomla's most popular community extension, Community Builder, has passed the 300k mark for registered members—nearly as many as the Joomla Discussion Forum itself. Starting at the birth of Joomla, Joomlapolis has been steadily growing ever since.

To celebrate this remarkable achievement, a series of festivities have been planned for the "Community of Community Builders" on Joomlapolis. Additionally, the CB team has decided to sponsor $1000 worth of Andrew Eddie’s professional time to work on getting Joomla 1.6 ready.

The authors of Community Builder, Nick and Beat, spoke proudly, "Our 300K members, our 2 million plus downloads, our 120K forum posts and our 51 million website visitor marks would not have been reached without riding on Joomla wings. We are thankful of Joomla and are showing it."

Congratulations to the Community Builder team!

Invariably, once you've mastered using Joomla, one of the next subjects you will at least spend some time on, is Joomla Performance. Why? Well, these days, even Google says that site performance may have an impact on your SEO results. So, this becomes quite an important subject now.

Now, here's the challenge. I'm going to outline some basic rudimentary steps that you can take to optimize your sites performance, and I'd like to hear any other suggestions that you may have ... here's the kicker though, steps users can take WITHOUT making addons to Joomla. I feel very strongly that too many times, when it comes to security and performance, some users miss focussing on the fundamentals and instead look into more complex solutions when in fact, they could perhaps have achieved a reasonable performance improvement without any great efforts or cost. I also think the majority of Joomla users are running Joomla in a shared hosting environment, so talking about too many server side optimisations could also overwhelm them with steps they are unable to take anyway.

So, here are a few basic suggestions I have, and after that I'd look forward to hearing yours, keeping in mind the challenge I mentioned above.

• Enable Joomla's inbuilt caching. At worst, you can even set it to the file method if your server doesn't have any php caching installed.
• Keep Joomla up to date, performance is continually being improved with each new version/update.
• Keep all Joomla Extensions up to date. Not only is this essential for security, but many performance problems can be traced back to Joomla Extensions.
• Is your host running up to date versions of php, mysql and apache etc? Again, essential for security. php5, mysql5 and Apache 2 are bare minimums in my mind at the moment.
• Is the host you run your server on known for performance, reliability and security? Have you spoken to your host and established their knowledge or and experience with Joomla? If you're paying $2 a month for an unlimited space and bandwidth host, don't expect good performance.
• Have you considered your images, css and javascript size as important to the performance of your website? What about using a CDN (content distribution network) to help speed things up in this area? These days, there are very affordable CDN solutions available.

.. well.. there's a start.. now it's over to you. What other basic, fundamental steps can users of Joomla take to improve performance, without any additional Joomla Extensions?

There are some pretty exciting changes coming with regard to how we work on Joomla!.  In the near future we are going to be allowing developers to register accounts via our Joomla! Developer Network site and be given access to commit code to our subversion repositories with those accounts.  We will be keeping the trunk and release sections of our repository secured for trusted maintainers, but anyone will be able to create and work in branches so that more people can be working collaboratively on making Joomla! better.

While these changes are a fantastic step towards facilitating access to the core software, they also potentially expose the project to some problems.  Historically, gaining commit access to the core repository has come with earning the trust and favor of the existing committers.  This has kept the group relatively small, and given us all good assurances that the people who are committing code understand the ramifications, both legal and social, of having that privilege.  By opening up to self-registration we are losing some of that assurance, so we felt it was important to formalize the terms under which we accept contributions to our project repositories.  

I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with OSM, the Production Leadership Team, and obviously OSM’s attorneys to come up with what we believe to be a great solution to these challenges: the Joomla! Contributor Agreement (JCA).  The JCA is based on the Sun Contributor Agreement, version 1.5, by Sun Microsystems, but obviously reworked for our purposes.  My hope is that it will make expectations for both the contributor and the Joomla! project more clear as we move into the future.  What I am presenting here today are three draft documents, and I am asking for your feedback.

Andrew Eddie recently presented about many of the new features that will be available in Joomla 1.6 at the Joomla Day in Melbourne, Australia, on 13 February 2010.

In early 2009 the Community Oversight Committee (also known as the core team) sent the OSM board a message that began:

"The Core Team would like OSM to investigate and report on the feasibility of creating some sort of company which can deal with the financial issues currently facing the project. • as a means of handling revenue and expenditure needed by the project without sacrificing OSM's non-profit nature.
• as a means of attracting or developing new funding sources.
• to make it easier to disburse funds to individuals and organisations to compensate them for work performed which furthers the goals of the project."

The board spent most of 2009 considering how to respond to this in the context of our responsibilities as a non profit board, which are different from the responsibilities of  COC members or other people involved in the Joomla! Project.  In the extensive work that was done in response to this email, the board made the decision that it was important to take a step back. That is, that the COC was proposing a solution, but to a set of problems that had not really been well defined. So, we took the three points on the list as goals and sought to examine how best to reach them, whether through the formation of a for profit company or some other means. So as goals, we knew we wanted to increase revenues, maintain non profit status for OSM, and create the possibility of compensating key individuals and organizations.  However, the board did not accept that the solution necessarily had to be the creation of a for profit company

Today the 15 millionth copy of Joomla! was downloaded from Joomlacode, just 250 days after the 10 millionth download That's an average of 20,000 per day. Wow.

Thanks to everyone for making that happen: users, developers, people on all the teams and people on no team, but who help out in all kinds of ways or just recommending Joomla! to others.

And special thanks to Rochen for coping with the incredible bandwidth demands and to the Joomlacode team for keeping it all running smoothly.

We are pleased to inform that the following people have been elected and have all accepted the invitation to join the OSM Board of Directors:
 
Marko Milenovic, Javier Gomez, Jacques Rentzke, Robert Deutz, Akarawuth Tamrareang and Steve Burge.

These new members, who all were among the community nominated candidates too, will bring on a broad set of skills to the board, and we feel that the current members combined with the new, will form a great team.

Dave Huelsmann has been reelected, and we are very pleased that he accepted to continue the great work he contributed with so far.

A huge 'Thank you' we would like to send to Wendy Robinson and Lorenzo Garcia for the valuable work they contributed during their membership of the board.

 
The Joomla! Community Oversight Committee

In light of Joom!Fish's recent accomplishment of 1,000,000 downloads on JoomlaCode.org, it seems fitting to blog about it.

To date there are 5 projects that have this distinction. As of this writing, they are:

Recently, Vu Hoang Viet a friend in Vietnam who was involved with the Vietnam JoomlaDay I attended last year, shared with me the following news article. He's translated it for English speakers below:

According to ICTNews, a newspaper of Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) in Viet Nam, Joomla has been recognized recently as an open source product which has high priority in purchasing and using in all goverment agencies.

Beside Joomla, there are other 7 open source products added to the recommended list this time: 
MIC announced a list of recommended open source product in 2007 that already has OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox and Unikey( Vietnamese typing program).

Liferay (version >= 4.0)
Drupal (version >= 6.10)
Alfresco (version >= 3.0)
Postfix (version >= 2.5)
SendMail (version >= 8.13)
MySQL (version >= 5.1), PostgreSQL (version >= 8.3)
Ubuntu

 

I found it interesting, and felt it worthy to share.

If you have the impression that more people are helping out with version 1.6, then you are correct. I just did a quick look through the CHANGELOG file for the past month and I found 22 names of contributors. Here they are:

Amy Stephen, Andrea Tarr, Andrew Eddie, Angie Radtke, Arlen Walker, Christophe Demko, Christopher Garvis, Dejan Acman, Elin Waring, Hannes Papenberg, James Kennard, Jean-Marie Simonet, Jeff Channell, Jeff Fendley, Jonnathan S. Lima, Louis Landry, Mark Dexter, Nabyl Sadki, Omar Ramos, Robert Deutz, Ron Severdia, and Sam Moffatt.

My apologies if I missed someone. We have been trying to lower the barriers and encourage more people to join in the fun, and it seems to be working. If you would like to help out, there is plenty to do. Please join us on the Joomla CMS Development list to find out where you can best help out. Thanks!

The Vulnerable Extensions List Team have updated the procedures for the Vulnerable Extensions List and thought we would share how we do it to prevent some common and increasing miss-understandings.

As readers of this blog, the development mailing lists and the work group forums know, in recent weeks we've been collecting feed back on having some paid development. We asked people to reflect on the impact on them personally and collected both survey type information and open ended responses. Thank you so much to the 70 people who responded for taking the time to share your thoughts and for the really thoughtful and heartfelt responses.

The form closed a little while ago, and we know people are curious, so we wanted to share the results right away. The qualitative results are here.

I'll just share some simple descriptive statistics below. Of course it will be extremely interesting to see how different subgroups differ, but these results are extremely interesting.  Later there will be more posts that summarize overall findings and patterns.

As you know, this past fall OSM started to pay Louis and Andrew for a day or two of their time per week working on Joomla! Development. This was done as an experiment, and now is the time at which we will begin evaluation of the results. The most important question is: what is the impact of this on our community of contributors, which is to say the people who are contributing to the Joomla! project.  We are also interested in the thoughts of the wider world of engaged users and Joomla! business people who may not contribute directly, but do have a stake in the continued success of the Joomla! Project.  We invite everyone to participate in this process by filling out this form.   We'll collect responses until 11:55pm UTC on January 31 2010.

We want to emphasize that this form focuses on the actual impact on people and firms, not on philosophical discussions or speculation about the impact on other people.

Of course a form like this is not in any way a vote or a popularity contest, nor is it scientific. It is simply one of a number of ways of collecting information from people with a variety of experiences and backgrounds. We'll be sharing the results of this and other analyses in February.

Thanks for your help with this.