So you are looking at the Joomla Volunteers Portal and browsing through the list of teams, and all of a sudden you see “CMS Maintenance Team”, and you might wonder: what is this team? What do they do? Who is in it? Are they happy with what they do? You are about to find out: meet the CMS Maintenance Team!

What is the team’s main goal?

Robert Deutz: This team is responsible for reviewing all patches submitted to Joomla, merging patches into the code base, and ensuring that the high standards of Joomla are maintained at all times.

Christiane Maier-Stadtherr: Telling a little bit from a member’s point of view: we are the watchdogs in front of Joomla Core and reliable partners for release leads. Every member of this team has a special field of experience. Javascript, framework, accessibility, security, code quality and so on. We share knowledge and co-operate in difficult decisions. Not much noise (or only when I am not online?). But let me say: the click on a merge button sometimes is a challenge for my blood pressure! If a maintainer makes a mistake, especially at release time, it could have severe consequences for Joomla as a whole.

What is your place in Joomla’s ecosphere?

Robert: We are part of the production department.

What roles do you have within the team?

Robert: Besides the “normal” team members, we have all maintainers for the different repositories and release leads in our team. Basically we have a flat structure, everyone helps in all areas.

Team members: introduce yourself please :).

Robert: I have been in this team for a couple of years and currently the team lead. I am trying to do as little code as possible and concentrate on managing the team. Help to get new people up to speed and be available for questions for my team.

Christiane: I joined the team in 2020, after participating in backend template development and frontend template development for J4. As team lead of Joomla accessibility team, I am supervising accessibility concerns in Pull Requests.

Viviana Menzel: After working on improvements for Cassiopeia in 2020, I was asked to join the team to help with pull requests related to the template and accessibility issues. Together with Christiane, I am lead of the Joomla Accessibility team.

Richard Fath: Since I was a member of the Bug Squad for a while, I was asked to join the team at the beginning of 2020. I was told that I just had to continue with what I had done before plus a little bit of merging maybe, and that’s what I do. My main focus is on database, update and installation related topics, mainly functionality under the hood so most users don’t care about, but required for a reliable and stable CMS.

How often do you have meetings, and how do they take place?

Robert: We have no extra meetings. We are in a permanent meeting, all day and night long.

What tools do you use to work together?

Robert: We are on Glip, of course - but we are working on Github and in the Joomla Issue Tracker. Our most used and most important platform is GitHub. Here we also have our communication with contributors and developers.

If you had three words to describe the atmosphere within the team, what would those words be?

Christiane: Cool, Subject-related, professional

Robert: fun, reliable, professional

Richard: collaborative, open-minded

How did the team develop over the last year(s)?

Robert: People come and go but in general we do not have so much fluctuation. We are doing our job, most of the time this runs without so much noise and that’s good. Sometimes we have to make tough decisions then it can be a bit louder.

Do you need extra volunteers, and if so, in what capacities?

Robert: I think the size of the team is good. To really help you need special knowledge and the learning curve is high. Usually we add people that are active on github and have already proved that they could be a good addition to the team.

(JCM: We’ve heard the team is much bigger than it may look from this article, but it has a couple of quiet brilliant people who work really hard. If you are one of them and read this: you are awesome)

Which team should we interview next (and why)?

Christiane: Bug Squad Team - Because there is a strong relation between these teams. Bug Squad prepares the work for maintainers.