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What a journey this has been! We want to thank each and every one of you for sharing your gifts with the Joomla! community and, in doing so, leaving with us a bit of who you are. What an honor for us.

Now that the contest is complete, I have to admit, we had no idea what to expect from this contest. To be honest, I was a little bit skeptical that pre-university students could actually produce something useful for our community. Immediately though, as soon as the contest began, each of you blew us away with your skills and your positive attitudes and your incredible work ethics -- and you produced really amazing work.

You also seemed to appreciate the honor that comes from being a contributor in an open source community. You modeled for us how communities should interact - you demonstrated that someone else's success is worth contributing towards - that we are responsible for one another - and that we can have fun while learning and working together to make Joomla! better.

Those of us who worked with you are really proud of this group of standout young people. Really proud. We hope to see you around the forums as you have time in your busy schedules.

Many times, as I interacted with you all, I thought of Cat Steven's song Oh, very young and I wanted to share it with you.


We hope that this experience was a positive one for you and that it has helped enrich your life. We know that you have enriched ours and we thank you for that.  We hope that you continue to interact with one another and build strong friendships. Thank you for your considerable contributions to the Joomla! community! If you need something, please ask, we will certainly try to help you if we are able. You have earned our support and respect.

Thank you very much for participating with Joomla! in the GHOP program,
Amy

I think everyone will agree with me when I say that GHOP has been one of the most inspiration times of my life so far, and that GHOP with Joomla could never had gone so far or succeeded so much without your support Amy.

GHOP has tought me so much, both about Joomla!, the way the developments works, and about myself. That even a 16 year old without any qualifications or certificates can participated in such an amazing project, that being Joomla!. When I first found Joomla! I saw it merely as a script. But it is so much more than just a content management system - it's a community project.

So Amy, all the people who helped us GHOPers, Google and each of my fellow GHOP entrants whom many I so proudly now claim as my friends - thank you!

GHOP was an amazing experience and I enjoyed it immensely. It goes without saying that I learned a ton about Joomla! 1.5. I've been using Joomla! for nearly 2 years now, but I hadn't had the opportunity  to work with 1.5 until GHOP. Its been awesome learning all about the new features that 1.5 has. I know more about 1.5 than the person who taught me how to use 1.0.X!

Thank you so much Amy for putting up with all of us. Without you this contest would have been chaos for sure. I'd like to extend a personal thanks to Max for his excellent editing skills. Max, you were a great help and my tasks wouldn't have turned out as nicely as they did without you checking them over. I appreciate it a great deal.

GHOP was amazing for me! I'm very happy I could participate and contribute to the enormous Joomla! community. I learned a lot. Writing documentation, making UTPs, and coding of course.

Without 'our' judges this couldn't be possible!
It must have been cost loads of work to communicate, check, answer questions, and many more things, for all GHOP students.
Great work!
Thanks Amy, Elin, Chris, Wilco, Translation Team Members willing to check the installation manuals... and I'm sure I forgot some

>>>>> I know that those words like "i love it", and other looks empty in the Internet, but we can't express how it's amazing project. I don't want to repeat GHOPers, also, so I am gonna tell only one small thing to our mentors:
WOOO, IT ROX, THANKS! <<<<<

See you on the forum

GHOP really showed how Joomla!'s community is excellent in every way FOSS communities can be.

It's not about the contest, it's about the people - the spirit of volunteering and helping.

-Shantanu

Well, this experience with Joomla! has been a very good one for me. I even tried installing and using Joomla! despite my general dislike of CMSes! (No offence to Joomla!, of course. I just have a lot more fun if I get to code the site myself. Before I could code I used CMSes just fine )

I ended up not using it because coding is fun, but regardless I had fun helping out. I'd still be glad to help out further, so if you guys still want me to hang around a while, drop me a line!

I did one task only, but GHOP really help me understanding Joomla!

I would like to give a big thanks to all those who helped make us so successful, this was my first experience with a open source community and i loved it, thanks GHOP but most especially the Joomla! comunity. You Guys are Great!

Wow,  GHOP is...  over. 

It was a lot of fun to work with other on a free software project.  I learned so much about working in this kind of situation.  If you haven't tried glob2 (http://www.globulation2.org/wiki/Main_Page) try it.  It is a great game, and I am doing their music now!!  I am putting my GHOP skills to use! 

A special thank you to Amy, Elin, Google, and all of the GHOP 'contestants'.  Joomla! has been evolving so much.  1.5 was released during GHOP!  A coincidence?  I think not!  (It probably was,  but this makes it sound better).

Who could have guessed that a LXer RSS feed in mid-Movember could have turned into something this great!  I really hope everyone here will continue to work on free software projects. 


Thanks again, to everybody!!!
Max

It's not a coincidence if you consider the unit test plan tasks. Those were probably essential to ensuring 1.5's stability and usability. 1.5 wasn't necessarily released because of GHOP, but I would guess that many of the tasks aided in the further documentation and stabilization of 1.5.

So there really are some of those contributions that probably made the release a lot easier for the Joomla! community.

-Shantanu

Thank YOU soo much for letting US be a part of it!!!!!!! 

I really enjoyed it! I hope I can do it again next year... and maybe be able to finish! I was really bummed by not being able to get that last entry in... that stunk! No matter what - I had fun...

Special thanks to Amy for all your hard work... and to all of those who put up with me on the journey through task 032... lets not repeat that again! And MiCCAS - you rule 

 

Hi,

I am soo sad its over  but it was soo incredibly fun and cool and soo many more superlatives that also fail to do Joomla GHOP justice.

I just wanted to say thanks not only too the great people at Joomla! for there help and support with this project (Amy Stephen, Elin Waring and others whose names currently elude me ) but also to Leslie Hawthorn of Google's Open Source Programs Office and the other people at Google.

Although I didn't post in many of the other projects threads, it was really great to see all the tasks coming together and the way everybody helped eachother with constructive criticism, links to useful tid bits and soo much more.

After participating in this contest it has made me very keen to not only use open source but to be part of open source. 

Cheers,
James