Joomla! Discussion Forums

@ivo - k - let me find out. be back in touch SOON. thanks. amy

you saw my PM, right? check the link i sent you. THANKS!!! 

as far as I know, the 4.5.3 had no UTF-8 support and wouldn't have been a real internationalized version. Still, you're right. A interims version that had this functionality would have eased a lot of troubles. The problem is, that is the past and we have advanced quite a lot on this, so this would sadly not be the solution. In addition, if there would have been this release, all those new things like patTemplate and ACL would have been added, too in the know coming release, which would have thrown back the timetable another 6-10 month.


I'll try to answer your questions, one at a time:

1. For whom is Joomla?
Joomla should be for all those people out there that want to have their own webpage that goes beyond the stuff you can make with the editors you get from your ISP. It also wants to provide companies with a reliable and extensible product that caters to their needs. All the time the main target is to keep it simple. Simple for the end-user and simple for the developer.

2. Why am I doing this?
I'm doing it purely for the fun. Lately I've had ideas about selling my skills to the people out there, but at the moment I'm not that far.

3. Why are the devs doing it?
A few of the devs do it for the fun and the challenge, others do it to earn money with additional services they provide. Alex "akede" Kempkens for example has a consulting agency that creates you your website based on Joomla and codes custom extensions for this. (If I understand it correctly) Since he is earning money with that, he gives back to the community as a core dev. All together they are coding to improve the product and have something better to present their customers.

4. Where is the project going?
With 1.1/1.5, a lot of work has been done to the framework to prepare it for 1.2/1.6 where we will get rid of several limitations that are in the design of the Mambo framework. We will have a really good and extremely but yet easy to manage access managment, the output will run through patTemplate and a lot of smaller changes will happen, probably even the limitation of the section/categorie-system will fall.

5. What plans are there for version 2?
I don't know, but from the few things I could catch in the forum and in personal chats, it will be faster and more lightweight then the current system, but require php5. I don't know if there are really advanced plans for 2.0 yet.

6. Will the current work go into 2.0 and will it speed up the development process?
Yes for both. The refactoring has been made in direct view of 2.0 and it will speed up the development process for 1.2/1.6 and 2.0. For example the ACL implementation will be MUCH easier with this new structure.

7. What is this framework and who decides what is part of it?
The framework is the API behind Joomla. All functions in the code provided by Joomla can be seen as the framework. The components, modules and mambots/plugins are NOT part of the framework. Those extensions shipped with Joomla are in basic theory only meant to show a developer how to do such a component. In reality Joomla wouldn't work with some of the core components.
The core team decides what goes into the core, based on voices from the community. The main target however is to keep it as slim as possible and not to extend it with further components if not really needed. Admitted the process is not very transparent.

8. Why the heck are we left so uninformed and why are we not involved in the development? (read by me between the lines )
In the future, the development of Joomla will be decided by the community and the devs are working in that direction. Look at the Java Community Process (it even allready has the J in the abbreviation. JCP  ) Besides that, I just can say, wait and be surprised.

I hope a few of your questions have been answered, although I think you know most of the answers allready. Atleast it will inform a few users.
Hannes

hackwar - other than that one post from yesterday that me spit my soda on my computer screen, everything you write is so informative and smart that i almost have to print it out and use a highlighter to learn. thank you again! amy

Hoping not to stir up any more anger/confusion... BUT

From a 'newbie' point of view, my frustration with the release of 1.1 / 1.5, is that there is no single place to find information about the release, other than this thread.

- On the Joomla Forge, it is still labeled as 1.1, and the latest announcement on there was posted on January 15th.
- On the Joomla website, the last post about 1.1 was on January 1st.

And as much interest as I have in what is going on with this release, I really don't have time or patience to sift the 5-10 page forum threads reading all the banter to try and find out what is going on with this release. I'd rather have one place to go, with CURRENT information about what is going on. A current, single point of reference for this release would probably satisfy the frustration and curiosity of the many people who have posted to this thread.

I mean, come on people... this is JOOMLA, the most powerful content management system in the world (IMHO) and we are having communication problems??? Let's use the technology to keep people up to date and happy.

IMHO, Andy

Hey legs - they are still in the midst of figuring it out. they don't know yet. and - yea - that'll stir the pot.  the organization is less than 6 months old. to say there are growing pains is an understatement. unfortunately, what happens with these posts is the few people who have most of the work have to answer those questions and they are already buried.

so, yea - what you said unfortunately has been said at least a dozen times on this thread -- gotta give time for structure to be built -- right now - scrambling. them's the facts today. not later. they will get it all running smooth in time. i think in another 6 months, you won't recognize the place.

you are the ONLY one from omaha without a job. what do you want to do?

your neighbor amy.

Why this 1.1/1.5 thing is a big deal is beyond me.  I have tried to understand it from all angles, but really see no real reason why this is an issue. Really. The name change was mentioned in a chat ... only a short time ago... no offical announcement has been made, but some in on the chat have decided that it is the end of the Joomla world as we know it.  Relax people.  Very rarely is anything ever the end of the world ..

Let the Devs do their job.  Keep doing whatever it is you do. 

And please stop going round and round and round and round on the same things.. it gets tiresome and disheartening and if anything is going to tear Joomla up it is going to be emotional fatigue and the over and over again generalized bashing and disheartening of people.  Honest.

amen.

hackwar -

did you see torkil's post?

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic ... #msg272946

it is so hilarious and he really kind of left it for you, in particular.

i showed it to my husband a few times, now. he and i think that is the funniest ever.

Got that allready. I think its hilarious. I send the link allready to a dozen people.

BTW: My english wasn't have as good only 7 years ago...

Hackwar

Well thank goodness you didn't work for the German Coast Guard back then!

I don't know any other language. Man, we have to change that in the US. Stupid. (yes, i know there are a FEW other things we need to improve on, as well.)

I understand -BUT- like I said. Let's use the technology. How long does it take to post news on the forge? How long does it take to post news on the joomla site? With all the activity that has been going on with this project, we can certainly do better than posting once every three months. I'm not recommending with have an additional site or an additional technology. My main complaint here is we have too much going on. We have existing places for communication that are not being used to their full extent, and it doesn't take hours of effort to keep them up to date.

And I do get that people, including myself, have been going round-and-round with this  type of suggestion/criticism... but look at it as such: if people are still going round-and-round about it, then the problem obviously has not been solved or mitigated, and should perhaps be bumped up in priority?

If a persistent criticism is "we don't know what is going on with 1.1 / 1.5" then an answer of "we are working on it" is not going to make people happy and they are going to continually come back asking for more information.



Didn't you know... I have a job... web developer... full time ++, lol

That said, have a conversation with me when we meet next week and we'll see if there is a spot I can help fill.

what amy means is that you haven't got yourself a duty in joomla environment. 
btw, amy is in the documentation team now. 

Yeah, I got that... Amy and I will talk about it at the first ever Midlands Joomla Conference 2006, to be held at Starbucks in Omaha, NE next Thursday. Open invitation for anyone who wants to join us.

yup. skip. ok. u do understand EVERYONE who "works" for joomla has a regular job, right? you also understand there is no money for this work, right? and, of course, you understand that these people have families and lives and sleep needs, right?

Ken and myself included - we have jobs, too. (not that we are doing any heavy rock carrying mind you, but we are trying to chip in.)

So - to really stick it to you since you are not reading between my very subtle lines (and I do this with  Omaha LOVE):

1. no complaining allowed;

2. no suggesting solutions (these are not stupid people, andy);

3. you have two choices that are available to everyone:

    a) take what's available (many do that and it is a PERFECTLY acceptable option);

    b) pick one of 1000's of things that need to be done that YOU are going to do.

Agreed. We will talk about it Thursday over beer. (coffee is not right for this).  (WHY is there no beer icon. THAT complaining is ok. becuz i say so.)

AND watch the German Coast Guard VIDEO. OH MY GOSH!!!! that is HILARIOUS!!!! i can't watch it enough.

edit: removed words "shut up" since the joke landed like a bomb. sometimes, things sound really funny in my head, but ...

Hi guys,

I would just like to put some perspective on the extent of the internationalisation work in version 1.5. I have posted an article in this forum which gives an outline. http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,50934.0.html

One needs to understand that the undertaking to be backward compatible with php 4 and to also support utf-8 requres that every single string function call needs to be examined and changed if it has utf-8 implications. (There are several thousand). I strongly recommend looking at this article to understand the dangers of utf-8 and php http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8

I am aware of the HACK recommended to make Joomla 1.0.x so called utf-8 compatible. It is however only a hack and does not deal with the incompatibilty of PHP and utf-8 at all. It works reasonably for some languages and unacceptably for others.

I write this hesitantly and I will try and be very careful not to stir anything up...

First I will say that I am impressed by the quality of code that is being put together and the work that is being done.  IMO, it IS worth the wait.

But I hear what some of the people here are saying.  What I sense lacking is communication... when things happen, when things change, it is hard to keep up to date about what is going on, unless you spend quite a bit of time on the forums, and even then it can be difficult...

As examples, the current roadmap is found on dev.joomla.org.  I question whether this is the right place for it...  dev.joomla.org is a site for developers.  More on this point, the current roadmap shows that we are going beta in Q1 2006... this gives us until tomorrow.  I read a post from hackwar yesterday saying that it was a couple of weeks off...  I don't want to get into a discussion about roadmaps, but if a timeline has changed, we need somebody to write a short announcement to say 'hey, you know what, we got bogged down a little bit.  We had trouble with this, and we had trouble with that, and so and so had a really busy week at his day job and couldn't put the time in that he needed to and so we are running behind'.  This shouldn't be a dev worrying about this, but someone who can communicate on behalf of the devs...

As for the version change, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.  There is an impulse inside of me that says 'who cares?  it is only a number.'  But somebody obviously cared enough to decide to change this.  Someone commented here that this was announced in an IRC chat for developers.  Okay, so you've made the decision to do this...  let's communicate this as an announcement and say 'Hey guys, in light of the fact that we were originally planning to deliver x and it has turned out that to get there we had to deliver 2x or 3x or 4x, we are changing the version number to y.

patTemplate was introduced a while back and the devs said they were going to push it and support it... well it turns out that this means a bit of a performance hit...  let's explain this to people and let the developers know so that we can make informed decisions.

This doesn't have to happen now.  I know full well that there is still much to be done in the next week or two to get 1.5 in to BETA.  I prefer quality over quantity...  At this point I'd rather see the devs push forward on getting this done rather than wasting significant time with peripheral stuff.  But I guess what I am saying is this is the direction that I (personally) would like to see things go.  I would like to see Joomla! become something that is as used and respected in the commercial world as much as apache and similar projects...  There are essential features that need to happen, and sometimes business decisions get made based on whether these features are ready...  If this takes longer than we originally expected it to...  then so be it.  But let's give the decision makers as much information as we possibly can so that they can make informed decisions.  In my opinion, it is better to give more information than less, and it is better to tell people it will be some time off than to have people get burned because we had information but it wasn't available.  If people have to try another solution in the meantime because we aren't going to be ready, that is okay...  but if people get burned by relying on promised deliverables that aren't delivered, then they probably won't come back.

This is a start to where I think we need to go...  yeah, I know Rome wasn't built in a day.  I am managing an organization that needs lots and lots of work...  and I also deal with people who get frustrated when change doesn't happen overnight...  but maybe we, as the Joomla! community need to set out a roadmap for what we want to see happen as a community (not talking about code, but about communication, etc...  if we build up a structure in our community and have one representative (we don't want thousands of people pestering the devs) that will liason with the devs and bring this information to the people then I think good things will happen to complement the good things that are happening in the core...  are the devs communicating with each other?  If so, can we have somebody who can monitor this communication and present it to the public?

I have been working hard as part of the API doc team, and I do so in trust that these things will improve.  If I can be part of the solution, I would be happy to...  let me know how I can step up...

Ian

Ian - nicely said and all good points. I hope someone sees that you are willing to do EVEN MORE and uses you.

One clarification: "... was announced in an IRC chat for developers.  Okay, so you've made the decision to do this".

My understanding is that it was MENTIONED in an IRC chat as a possibility. I think that is where we are at. Good or bad. Right or wrong. up or down. (I don't get the significance, either, but I like how you worded it. I feel the same.)

I will take option B with some modifications.

1. I will not shutup. First of all it's not a polite word (thanks mommy...) and secondly, if we as a community tell people to shut up and keep their opinions to themselves, then we are destroying the very nature of an open source community. While our thoughts and opinions may not always be pretty or even polite conversation, it is all for the betterment of this project and the community as a whole. Every opinion matters, especially the opinions that push us out of our comfort zone.

2. I offer myself up (on a plate, per se) to contribute to the project. I am WAY NEW at this, so I don't even know where to begin or what there is that I can contribute, but I offer to help. I would LOVE to be able to help by being a channel for communication within the community, between the core team and the community, or however else I can fit in. Give me something to do and I'll do it.

Thanks,
Andy

me sorry. (i was hoping you'd take it in jest.)

but, andy -- these "opinions" have been voiced repeatedly on this thread -- this very thread -- over and over and over .

you know the saying 'lead, follow or get out of the way.'

tell me a good way to say it now that you know what i mean. that's your first job.  take my post -- the one with the impolite words in it and revise it so it's an FAQ worthy document.

THAT would help. And, i think you have the writing skills to pull it off. < edit - andy - does simply removing offensive words do it? SORRY! >
(but, i am sorry to offend. i really didnt want to do that!)

++++++++

edit: removed words "shut up" above since the joke landed like a bomb. sometimes, things sound really funny in my head, but ...

seems like you need a PR team to help co-ordinate communication.  Maybe thats what the crux of the problem is.

or, a complaint desk! lol ... u have a good point, shawn!

I'm going to try to answer this stuff for you guys, then I'm going to leave this thread alone... I need this like i need a hole in my head.



1. For whom is Joomla?
Joomla is for anyone who wants it.  This is why it is an open source project.  Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, cousins, and yes ... even red-headed step-children.  Everyone.  Some aspects of the project suit people who like coding and developing, other aspects of the project suit people who just want to build a website.  It is for IT professionals who want an easy to maintain way of building an intranet or website.  It is for business managers looking for a cost-effective solution for building a site.  It is for hobbyists who want to toy around with a website or build an on-line community.  It is for everyone, and the fact that we give it freely to anyone and everyone should already make that clear.  We do not restrict who joins the forums, or who downloads the packages, or who views the source code, or does pretty much anything within our little world.  There are some rules for posting on the forums, but in reality they are fairly lax and are meant to make everyone able to enjoy the project equally.  This is not new stuff, and I do find it odd that someone would ask this (at least someone who has been around a while.. it seems a bit like someone looking to flare up emotions).

2. Why am I doing this?
That is a good question, sometimes I question it.  First and foremost I am enjoying working on the project.  I like PHP, and have used Mambo/Joomla for a long time.  I always had ideas about things that could be better and have gone through the schooling and training to help bring those ideas to fruition.  Also, I believe in the open source movement.  I think that it is an important paradigm shift in the way we as a world look at things/business.  I also thing it is a fascinating business model.  All in all, I love the project.

4. Where is the project going?
Forward. 

If you refer to David's excellent post, you will see that internationalisation touched a lot of things, and the idea was that if we were having to modify something to make it work with UTF-8, we ought to do it correctly and clean up messy code.  All the work done on 1.5 has been done with the future in mind, we took painstaking steps to write the code as futureproof as possible and as extensible as possible to allow for enormous flexibility.

A lot of what answers this question is on our roadmap.  Of course it needs to be reworked and all, but even if the numbers and dates are not all correct the concepts are.  Our goals for moving forward are there, how we arrive at them is something that will likely have to be constantly re-evaluated because of the very nature of an open source project.  Donated time, people are only available when they are available, etc...

5. What plans are there for version 2?
The real truth of the matter is that most of us (core devs) probably have subtly different ideas about this.  We need to get together in one way shape or form and figure out what the goals are for a 2.0 release.

6. Will the current work go into 2.0 and will it speed up the development process?
ABSOLUTELY!  This was a HUGE factor in how we wrote all of these things.  The restructuring of the system was very much (as i already stated) done with the future in mind.  We now have a very large set of base libraries to build upon and can use them to build any application we want.  In some ways our framework is more advanced than the recently revealed Zend Framework for building web applications on PHP.  We have set ourselves up for rapid development.

7. What is this framework and who decides what is part of it?
The framework is the heart and soul of Joomla.  It is the set of code libraries that make everything else possible, the common code among everything Joomla.  Frameworks are meant to facilitate software development by allowing designers and programmers to spend more time on meeting software requirements rather than dealing with the more tedious low level details of providing a working system. (from wikipedia)

The decisions for what is included in the framework are made by the core developers.  Decisions can be and are influenced by release goals, community input and time.

8. Why the lack of communication?
We actually do have an awful lot of communication coming out of the core team, but i am going to make a couple of comments on the subject.

First, often times announcements aren't made when you guys think they should be for the most obvious of reasons, we have NOT actually decided on something... perhaps a couple of us think a certain way, and have commented on it but an official decision has not yet been made on it.

Second, perhaps the guy that writes our announcements is out for one reason or another... perhaps there are other things going on in our lives that we deem more important than writing up a formal announcement.  And before you get into "well we don't need it to be formal just a quick note on it", think about what you are about to say.... we did drop a quick note on the 1.1/1.5 thing... see where it got us?  It was mentioned in IRC, then touched upon on the forums by several of us, and even talked about as 1.5 in the developers blog.

Thirdly, I agree that open communication channels are key... and you guys complained and complained already about the 1.1 delay back in December.  That is OK, we listened, and built the developer network site based on it... there is a blog, and a week doesn't go by that someone from the dev team is not writing something about what they are doing or what is going on with development.  Doing this takes time that I would otherwise be spending writing code or bugfixing.  We understand your frustration with things, but please understand that the less fun you guys make this for us the less we want to work on the project.  Its not a matter of wanting to shut you up.  Constructive criticism is valid and welcome, but I must tell you the flame wars over things take the fun level down several notches.

Fourthly, with respect to the international sites, if the Joomla core team is not in control of the site but we deem the site official, then we are publically taking responsibility for something we have no control over.  It is not logical.  The partnership is, in my mind an excellent balance which gives all the international sites flexibility to do as they please and a tie in to Joomla, but leaves us without any liability on the issue.  Also, it would seem that since an *official* announcement has not yet been made on reversioning 1.1 to 1.5, then at the moment it is still 1.1.  Your concerns over insufficient means of communication between the core team and translation sites is valid, suggest something.  Why is it that everytime someone has a problem with some aspect of this project WE are supposed to come up with the solution...  If you have a problem, find a solution... it often times is not that hard.  Do you want to create some sort of push method for information?  CREATE IT!! or even if you don't want to do that, SUGGEST IT!!  We all speak as if we want this to be a more open/community involved project... so.... Why do the core developers have to solve all the problems then?

I'm done now... I hope this answers the asked questions in an acceptable manner... these are the best answers I have.

Louis

Louis, very much appreciated.
Two things only:
point 1/ "for whom" was misunderstood, i did not mean "who can use it", I meant, have you defined a clear target user, or some main user profiles like in any softwared or website design process, and if so, which? Your answer to point 5 has me think, not really. If that *is* the case, no problem, just say the word (as you did): we're in it for the fun, and the final product is not as important as enjoying doing it. That's cool with me. It was never clearly said by anyone. And as some Core devs are using J! for income / Business, maybe they do have some clear goals or ideas about future needs they'd like to share?
Point 8, subpoint 4: we did propose to create, and offered to set them up, communication channels and an international coordinator between all communities and Core, right after the split & the creation of OSM. (we=admin team of Joomla.fr). We got a lot of bad echo about the way the proposal was made, and nothing ever resulted from it. Please ask infograph for details if you want them.. That's history now, but you know about burned cats, right?

Sorry to have caused disturbance, nothing was adressed to you or Jinx, you guys are doing a great job, I have repeatedly confirmed this. BUT: where's the rest of the gang? Why are announcements not handled by the project leader? You know, I update SVN daily, and there's not really much names in there most of the time.. mostly the same ones making the announcements, and answering important questions here. Where is the Team that walked all together to build this all? Why does all the burden (and thus heat) now (seem to) rely on you three guys shoulders (thank David for your insughtfull article!)? What happened? Where's the spirit that brought me back, when i was ready to just forget everything about a then nameless CMS

OK, Louis, my suggestion is: "Make the week in review" - something that is issued EACH week

No ivo, not Louis. Someone else, Louis is coding!

time to sleep, long day tomorrow (and saturday).
Do you use Firefox? I have an extension which shows 4 timezones in the status bar, very usefull: http://www.stemhaus.com/firefox/foxclocks/ 10 30 PM in US speak

[hey, where's amy s post this was the answer to??]

@eyezberg: I wrote to Louis, because he wanted suggestions
@AmyStephen: I have always been here

So far I have created two week in reviews posts. These posts take alot of preparation, asking coordinators to send me newsworthy information, nightly searches on google and technorati to find interested development related stuff. Preparing the actuall article ... it's very fun to do but takes about 8/10 hours to do properly. I had a new post planned for sunday, but recent flame wars have really taken out the fun and together with that my motivation to put all this effort into it. It will take some time to rebuild that again, i'm not a machine u can order to do things.

Jinx,

It should not be your responsibility to put out a week in review message. I volunteer to head up a team of people ultimately responsible for collecting and disseminating a "week in review" message. I'll be more than happy to collect the information and send it on to you or whomever you choose to get a final approve and to send out. It would be my privilege to do so.

Thanks,
Andy

flame wars.. i hope you do not mean my posts and take them personally, as these were not directed at head of coding, but rather head of project and other invisible Core people.. and certainly not intended to flame, but to bring those people back here if possible. I have questioned only the one decision of not releasing a 1.1 version without any unplanned utf-8 stuff when it was announced it would be, that's all. let's all get some sleep. good night. here comes the wink: