There's a New JEDi in Town...

The Joomla Extension Directory (JED) recently announced that Matt Baylor is the new JED Team Manager, aka the Lead JEDi. I sat down with Matt to learn a bit more about him.

Matt, first, congratulations on your new position. How did you initially get involved with the JED team?

Thanks. I started using Joomla in 2007. After finishing up design school I opened a business and figured I should pick one platform and stick with it. Of course, I chose Joomla. After things began to take off I felt that if I was making a living off of Joomla I needed to give something back. About two years ago I volunteered to help with fraud and abuse on the JED Team. It didn't take long until I was helping in just about every role throughout the team.

Everyone is talking about the end of life for Joomla 1.5 extensions. Can you explain when and how that will happen?

Well, the PLT sets the end of life (EOL) dates. The JED will keep 1.5 only listings six months past the EOL date. So everyone can expect 1.5 listings and the 1.5 tags to be unpublished towards the end of March 2013. The listing will initially just be unpublished. When a listing gets unpublished a notice is automatically sent to the email address the developer provides. If the listings are not updated to a supported Joomla version within 14 days they will be completely removed from the owners account.

What are your ideas for enhancing the JED?

There's quite a few ideas in the works and even more swimming around in my head. We're going to roll out a new review system, overhaul the extension that manages listings, set up a tutorial and project management site, round up all of the JED specific docs and load them into the JED knowledgebase, rewrite the Terms of Service and make some serious usability improvements. I'm intentionally being vague, otherwise I won't have much to talk about at the JWC JED Session :-)

The JED and the JCM will be working together on a new topic called Community Choice Extensions. Can you explain how that will work?

We're calling it "Community Choice Extensions". It was Peter's idea so he's going to run with it. How it works exactly is still being worked out but basically we are dropping the Editors Picks in exchange for a new list that will be chosen by JCM contributing authors each month.

Who are your JED team members?

You can always find a list of team members on the "About the Team" page (http://extensions.joomla.org/component/content/article/30). Over the past few weeks I have been digging up some of the most passionate and skilled Joomla community members to fill team roles. Without them the JED couldn't move forward.

How can the community get involved with the JED team?

Right now you can volunteer by filling out a volunteer application found on the JED Team page (http://extensions.joomla.org/component/content/article/30#volunteer).

One misconception is people believe that because they have commercial listings they’re ineligible to volunteer. I have no problem giving anyone a chance to help out if they want. I think it's time to look past things that may have happened in the past and give people a chance to contribute. If it doesn't work out for some reason, then it doesn't work out and we part ways. At the end of the day we can at least say we tried.

Once we migrate Joomla 3.0, the JED will be available on Git and anyone can contribute without having to be a team member.

Will we see you at the Joomla World Conference?

Yes, I have been summoned to San Jose :-) I'm looking forward to meeting everyone.