While at JAB11 in May, I heard comments from more than a few developers that it could be difficult to get their code accepted into the Joomla! core. So I committed to publishing a JCM article to try and address those concerns. In the first article of this two part series, I gave an overview of how the existing development process works. In this month's article, Mark Dexter and Louis Landry from the Joomla! Production Leadership Team have responded to questions about the development process that were submitted by other developers in the community.
Louis: There is always room for improvement. I think the first thing that would help is having people actively maintain the site. We've taken a step forward on that by inviting Rouven to be an administrator and I think that getting more people interested in moderating that site would be great.
Mark: I agree with Louis. More active management will help, and we have Rouven and one other volunteer working on this.
Louis: I think the ideas pool is biased towards what is on most people's minds. It is always more difficult to get your new ideas visibility. That is just one of those facts of life we have to deal with. In those cases I think it makes a lot of sense to be active on the mailing lists and in the tracker talking about what you are doing or want done. The idea pool is not the only communication stream available, but it is a good one. I do think there are opportunities to improve how the site is managed as I've said in the previous question, but that is something that I would largely leave up to those managing it.
Mark: I think it is important to keep in mind that the Ideas site is only one of several sources for enhancement ideas. In my old company, I used to talk about 4 sources of enhancement ideas: (1) customers; (2) our developers; (3) sales & marketing (feedback from prospects); and (4) the overall industry (competitors, trends, and so on).
I think our process is or should be somewhat similar. We hear from existing users via Ideas, forums, tracker. Our contributors contribute their ideas. We hear from community members who are competing with other packages. And hopefully the PLT and others are keeping an eye on the industry and trends.
Louis: This is something that we definitely are looking for more and more. It is already a part of our development strategy as can be found on the development site. I don't think we are yet in a position to be absolute sticklers on unit tests for all things, but it is something that we strongly encourage. If there are two things we are looking at to add into the codebase and one of them has unit tests written you can bet the farm on the fact that we'll go with the unit tested one nearly every time.
Mark: In a perfect world, everyone would be submitting a system test or unit test for any bug fix or code change. However, especially the system test aspect of that is not realistic at the present time. However, we should be working in that direction.
Louis: That sounds an AWFUL lot like our feature tracker.
Mark: Agree with Louis.
By accepting you will be accessing a service provided by a third-party external to https://magazine.joomla.org/
Comments