Getting Involved in the Joomla Community

Editor's Notes

• #3: TALK SLOW!“Hi I’m chad. I live in a small town in rural america called Spencer, located in the state of new york. We have cows too!
• #4: View I have outside my office at s-go consulting.
• #5: One stop light, one bank, one gas station, one grocery store. Lots of cows.
• #6: I was introduced toJoomla when I was about 15 years old. As an unpaid intern I started out entering content.
• #7: In 2008 I participated in Google’s Highly Open Participation Competition for Joomla.This was something I feel had a huge influence on involving me in the Joomla Community as an active contributor.GHOP helped to inspire me to contribute, and I hope that after today if you’re not already you’ll be able to find a way to give back to the project that has hopefully been helping you build great websites for clients or manage your own private site.
• #8: Currently an active editor of the Joomla resources directory
• #10: The Joomla Community is an organization – not an orgaization like open source matters or the organization of book son your bookshelf. But an organization of people, individuals or groups of individuals, like companies, who download and use joomla for some purpose. The Joomla organization, or community, is everyone working together to produce the Joomla product. Hint at “All together, as a whole”.
• #11: The Joomla community exists to propell forward the development of great web publishing software. The community is what makes or breaks open source projects like Joomla. If the community does not exist then the project’s software is probably stale and outdated. This type of thing can happen a lot in proprietary systems when the team experiences a burnout or the loss of senior developer or employer. With open source, the community cares about the product because it uses the product. The community always wants to make Joomla better because it has to use Joomla! The community is also what powers Joomla’s eco system and brand. In the Joomla community, especially at Joomla events, we get to meet and interact with developers at a personal level. Communicating with peers allows for stronger collaboration and working together.
• #12: So really the Joomla Community is all these diverse groups putting their expertise and experience into the project. We have this eco system where all levels are invited to help out.
• #13: In my family we have potluck diners. The idea here is that everyone in the family brings their best dish to the table. This means you get a lo of choices, a lot of options, and you’re going to eat really well. With Joomla this means you’re going to have the options you need to complete a lot of projects done without having to do a lot of custom development – someone else has already been where you are and written what you need.
• #14: So with this ideology, we get out of the project some high quality code with high standards, a community that is interested in moving forward and has a real interest in what happens, some world renowned software. Really because of this methodology we get Joomla.
• #15: So with so many userswhyarent more people contributing. As Jen said yesterday – there’s a real conversion problem with the organizaton. People don’t know *where* to go to contribute. Or maybe the don’t understand why they should. Whatever the reason, if they are using Joomla and not contributing back to Joomla – why not? It can be really costly in terms of time to contribute hours and code back to the project. But if the organization is poorly represeting the needs they have to fulfill they
• #16: So why should you want to contribute to Joomla? According to Karl Fogel in his book how to run an open source project, fewer than 10% of all open source projects actually succeed. Now we can argue what is and isn’t success in open source, but essentially the requires for failure would be the project becomes stale, no one contributes, and the users leave to find an alternative.If you’ve used Joomla and felt like it didn’t do what you wanted it to do, it’s not because it’s not capable, most of the time it’s because you or someone else hasn’t implemented it yet. In those cases, it’s your duty to implement!Joomla, the product, is not a good product without the community. How many times have we as web developers gone to clients or potential clients and raved about how proud we are that our community is so successful. An active thriving community is so reassuring that we sell our services on the fact that other people do what we do. Without the community the brand that exists in an active developed product is not possible. Joomla’sexistance is founded on community. A community that cared about the contributions that it had already invested in the project. It would be tragic to now stop contributing and stop caring when we’ve gotten this far.
• #17: So hopefully now we understand how the Joomla community works and functions. So what can *you* do?
• #18: Joomla, and many other open source projects need all different kinds of people to contribute to the project. There are many professionals already working to contribute to the Joomla project and this is what keeps the project going, keeps it pro, and allows us to be able to claim that we proudly power 2.7% of all websites on the internet today!
• #22: What is a patch, really? A patch is modifications to code that fixes a problem. This might be a unsecure code, broken functionality, an update to usability requirements or an improvement to code performance.
• #23: General users and implementors – the forums are a great place for you to hang out because as you use Joomla and become familiar with out different admin functions work, how to troubleshoot different things you become site admin experts. Your knowledge in valuable. So many times when I peruse through the boards I see the same questions asked over and over. It’s not because it’s hard to figure out or beceauseJoomla is difficult to use, but it just takes someone who’s been there and done that.
• #24: If you have the gift of communicating and you notice that a particular function or feature in Joomla is not really well known or described, write a doc on it. The documentation wiki allows anyone to create an account and contribute.
• #25: For the developers and those who are interested in being well informed on the inner organization workings of the Joomla community, join up with the mailing lists. Most of the decision making, development processs happens over these lists.
• #28: I’ve talked to a lot of developers about this specific contribution “type” here at JAB and the general feeling is that they feel that it’s extremely difficult to contribute code. What has the Joomla Project said about code contributions lately? The steps for contributing code is a very new and recent development.In fact the timelines for this part of the process is Mid April to the end of may. That means we should be in the heat of it right this second.It’s important to note that this system of contributing is NEW, and we really don’t know if it works or if it doesn’t. Yes there have been issues with this in the past as we all know, but its important to look forward and not dwell on what has happened. Looking back will not move us forward.