Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 10:
- Joomla! 4.0 or Next, Joomla! Platform or Framework, WTF is going on!?
- Tag - You're It
- Joomla Project to Apply for GSoC 2013
- 2013 overall project goals
- Proposed governance change: dissolving the Community Oversight Committee
- Two new members for Community Leadership Team
- Simple Image Gallery Pro version 3 and a new design approach for our components
- Warning: DOMDocument::schemaValidate() Error
- Introducing Zenhost - a new responsive Joomla template
- Everybody wins the show us your space competition
- sh404SEF 4.0.3.1552 released
Joomla! 4.0 or Next, Joomla! Platform or Framework, WTF is going on!?
Written by Brian Teeman
Joomla! 4.0 or Next, Joomla! Platform or Framework, WTF is going on!? A lot of discussion and confusion has been going on lately about the direction of the Joomla! project. What's in store for the CMS, what's going on with the Platform, why a new direction with the Framework, and how's all of this tie together. I personally don't have all of the answers, but what I can share is my own vision for the future and how everything ties together.
DISCLAIMER: In no way is this meant to represent the official stance of the PLT, this is just the opinion of someone who's contributed to making Joomla! better for everyone over the last three years and wants to continue doing so. This is a guest post by Michael Babker.
CMS 4.0 and Next
I've shared a vision with a few folks about how I would handle the future of the CMS, and with the new direction in the Framework, I think my vision is better defined. If I were in charge of development, I would "retire" the current CMS architecture at the EOL of the 4.x series, which is at the end of 2016.
Written by Nick Savov
It is almost time for Joomla 3.1 Beta and we wanted to give you a quick sneak-peek at the proposed new Tags feature to get you excited for it, which at this point looks like it will likely get in for Joomla 3.1 or at the latest for Joomla 3.2. Tags are a kind of meta-data that allow you to assign a keyword or keywords to a particular item. Since it's meta data, core and custom extensions could theoretically organize and display that meta-data in many different ways. For example, you might tag some contacts in Contact Manager as "Joomla Bug Squad" and do the same for some articles in Article Manager. You could then create a menu item (or use a module) to display, within a list, all the items tagged as "Joomla Bug Squad".
We also hope that this article will generate interest among extension developers and that you will consider budgeting some development time in the next few weeks to add tagging to your extensions.
Joomla Project to Apply for GSoC 2013
Written by Michael Babker
The spring time is drawing upon us, and for student developers, this is an exciting time of year. Google has again announced that it will be running the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. Continuing on the successes of previous years, the Joomla! Project will once again apply to participate in this program.
What is GSoC?
As listed on their homepage, Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects. In not so technical terms, college students are given the opportunity to work with open source projects like Joomla!, developing new features and improving their selected product, and pays them for their efforts. For the students selected to participate in this program, participating in GSoC is like a full time summer job, but much more fun than the traditional job.
Written by Paul Orwig
One of the agreements reached at the May 2012 leadership summit was to form an overall project goals and strategy working group. This working group includes members from each of Joomla's leadership teams: Chris Davenport (Production Leadership Team), Olaf Offick (Community Leadership Team), and Paul Orwig (Open Source Matters).
The purpose of this new working group is to work with the project's leadership and help define a three year vision statement for the project along with a set of one year overall project goals, and then to support the formation of working groups that will work on the different overall project goals.
A new step: Three year vision statement
The three year vision statement sets a high level objective and overall direction for the project. It is intended to help keep our major work efforts aligned, to point the way toward some overall goals, and to suggest the way to proceed when issues come up that might prove difficult to resolve.
Proposed governance change: dissolving the Community Oversight Committee
Written by Paul Orwig
In December of 2012, the Community Oversight Committee (COC) notified the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) that they had started the process to dissolve their committee. That process included consulting with an attorney experienced in such matters who could draft the necessary changes to the OSM by-laws. The COC also asked for feedback from OSM board members regarding if they agreed or disagreed with this proposed change.
In February of 2013, the COC notified OSM that they had voted unanimously to dissolve their committee. They also shared a set of revisions to the OSM by-laws to reflect this proposed change that were written by the previously contacted attorney.
This proposed change will be discussed and voted on by OSM board members in our next board meeting that is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, March 19. Because this represents a proposed change to an aspect of the Joomla project's governance, OSM wants to invite comments from the community about this matter in advance of our discussion and vote.
Two new members for Community Leadership Team
Written by Peter Martin
Some time ago we asked the community to nominate candidates for the Community Leadership Team. From all those nominations we selected a few people for interviews and asked two of them to join the CLT. We would like to thank all of the candidates for their time & responses, as well as the Joomla Community for the many excellent suggestions. Here are our two new CLT members and their backgrounds:
Guillermo Bravo -
Born and living in Iquique (Chile), Guillermo discovered Web Development in the early 2000's during his studies at Business Administration. Related with Joomla since 2007, when he created his first Joomla website.
Simple Image Gallery Pro version 3 and a new design approach for our components
Written by Fotis Evangelou
2013 is bringing a lot of new cool things from the JoomlaWorks labs. New extensions that we hope will redefine essential functionality within any Joomla! site and lots of updates to our existing line of extensions, like K2, Frontpage Slideshow and Simple Image Gallery Pro. The latter will now become a "component based" extension (from just a plugin) to allow content managers to easily create and edit image galleries and their captions for K2 and any other extension within Joomla!.
We've always put user friendlyness and ease of use above all when building our extensions. At least up to what's possible for any type of extension. Simple Image Gallery Pro was great (and still is) as a plugin that allows you to zip a bunch of files and quickly transform them to an image gallery grid. It's no wonder why the free version is one of the most popular extensions in the Joomla! Extensions Directory for many years now. People hate to use tools that take more time to deal with than the actual content they're producing.
Warning: DOMDocument::schemaValidate() Error
Written by Andy Miller
What an exciting day it has been! It seems that last night there was a widespread update for Redhat/Centos operating systems that run the webservers of many web hosting providers. This update included a version of the libxml2 library that is used by PHP when utilizing XML. This updated version of libxml2 seems to be causing widespread problems for existing PHP frameworks, projects and code that make use of those XML features. One of these is our own RokCommon library that is used by RokGallery and RokSprocket for both Joomla and WordPress. We make use of a static method called DOMDocument::schemavalidate() which seems to have broken with this last update, so please read more for a quick fix...
If you see an error resembling the following:
Introducing Zenhost - a new responsive Joomla template
I've just unwrapped our latest Joomla template and it's a little gem. Zenhost is a clean and simple business template built for those of you who sell your goods, products or services online. It's a flexible theme built with bootstrap and T3 and comes with a slew of features and options to make it your own.
Zenhost features a new free Joomla extension called Zen Feature Table which makes creating a feature table for your products a ... zen experience. The feature table is a lightweight module designed to detail your products or services in a responsive, bootstrap driven layout.
Everybody wins the show us your space competition
The old saying that you have to be in it to win it, has been slightly twisted today because "Everyone who was in it did win it" ... Well one person won it slightly more than the others, but everyone who entered the "Show us your workspace" competition from a few weeks ago will receive at least a 3 month subscription just for the effort of entering the competition.
I really enjoyed all of the entries and seeing all of your spaces. As I've mentioned previously, while web work can be physically isolating, there are ways that we can make our online experience more intimate and personal. One of those ways is to see where the people we email, skype, post forum threads to and tweet with works.
Written by Vic Drover
Today we released sh404SEF® 4.0.3 (build 1552) of the new version for Joomla! 3.0 . Release notes: This is the initial general release of sh404SEF® version 4 made available to subscribers.Most notable this is the first general release for Joomla 3.0 and includes new features such as the new character counter.
Changelog Updates for sh404SEF® 4.0.3.1552:
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Introducing Zenhost - a new responsive Joomla template
Everybody wins the show us your space competition
sh404SEF 4.0.3.1552 released
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