JAB'11 Un-Conference Discussion

[219jondn]

A continuation of the Joomla! Community Magazine article on Taking Joomla! Forward and the discussion of the JAB'11 un-conference.
Document on The Leadership Discussion available.
Feel free to join the conversation with your thoughts and ideas!

[jk1]

I think Joomla is simply suffering (does it actually suffer?) from some "luxury" problems which arise when open source communities become big. It is like a big puzzle. There is a continious process of taking out some pieces of the (Joomla-) puzzle and replacing it with newer pieces.

There are some highly intelligent individuals frequently developing new pieces for the puzzle. Their new piece of the puzzle might be extraordinary and they are eager to get it included in the (core-) puzzle. But then someone has to ask questions like:

If there are three devolopers supplying a new piece, which one do you accept?
(Three indivduals are likely to become frustrated - the one that gets kicked out plus the two that are not allowed into the puzzle)
Does it fit into the (code-) puzzle without breaking other pieces?
Is the advantage worth replacing the old one, which may still be working fine?

Joomla is made for website owners (users), so developers have to take into account their wishes. But that's not as easy as it might look at a first glance. Users are asking for new puzzle pieces (features) all the time. But simultaniously they also want long time backward compatibility and 'one click upgrades' which don't break anything in their individual puzzle (website).

Looking at the Joomla puzzle from a distance, it looks to me like there currently is a small battle between developers about whose code is going to be accepted into the puzzle and there are a few 'doorkeepers' in the organization who try to make shure the users are not confronted with a Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 type of migration every couple of weeks.

I think most website owner's are concerned about presenting content and from their point of view it usually doesn't make sense having to deal with a time consuming major overhaul of Joomla every couple of weeks or months.

...just my thoughts while reading about the "Un-Conference"...