I'm so pleased to be a part of Joomla community in this summer and help out with development while obtaining a great exposure to the open source and web development areas. Through this project I would like to help out Joomla users as well as the developers to get the maximum out of the Joomla modules.

About Me

I’m a final year student majoring Computer Science Engineering, at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I’m 24 years of age. I live in a small beautiful city - Galle, situated in the Southern coastal part of the country. I did my 8 months of internship at WSO2 Lanka (PVT) LTD, one of the major open source middleware companies based on Sri Lanka.

Even though I had contributed to many open source projects earlier, it was the first time which I mostly got interested in Open source culture of doing things. I’m mostly curious on using web technologies and passionate about the newly emerging areas of web development. In my 2nd year at the University, we were given an opportunity to attend a workshop on Joomla, which included few basics on creating a web site from the scratch.

After coming home, I too tried out Joomla 1.5 in Wampserver and was quite fascinated by the ease of creating a web site by myself. It is what first led me to Joomla. In the 3rd year, we were asked to create a Joomla website about a Tank Game client in the Module Programming Challenge (II). It is where I mostly got exposed to Joomla Plugins, Modules and etc. I was also involved in the Project ‘Idea Challenge 2011’ which was a Competition organized on behalf of the School children to develop a website for their school. I participated in a few workshops in schools to teach students Joomla as well.

Google Summer of Code with Joomla

This year, I was so curious to be a part of Google Summer of Code. I was looking forward on selecting a good project and it was Buddhima Wijeweera who came to me and told me, ‘Hey, why don’t you try out Joomla, you will surely find it to be quite interesting’. I had a look at the list of Project Ideas in Joomla and found the idea of ‘Module Modernization’ to be quite interesting, and it intersects with my capabilities. It was Elin who first showed me the bits and pieces to get in touch with Joomla development. This summer I will be working on the Project Module Modernization for Joomla.

The main motivation for me to select the project was that I had previous experiences working with Joomla. I should also mention the immense help I got from the community. I started working on Joomla CMS a bit early to make things familiar and understand well. With the help from the Joomla Community I was able to quickly learn and try out several tasks, particularly on Joomla modules. It really was one of the major motivations behind my curiosity towards the project.

Module Modernization

Joomla CMS Modules play an important role in the front-end, as well as in the back end (Site modules and Administrator modules). Modules are a very flexible extensions used in Joomla page rendering. Modules can be linked to other modules, components and articles, so that it will be very easy to handle and flexible to use.

With the amount of improvements in the Joomla v3, modules and their uses have been given a significant importance. This project mainly focuses on bringing the Joomla Modules up-to date and improve their usability by including new features and functionalities.

The project has mainly two parts.

1. Work on the existing modules and create new modules (mod_XX)
   1. Review existing modules, make changes, fix errors, use new features etc.
   2. Refine functional changes in the existing modules
   3. Create new modules
   4. Use new jLayouts. jImage etc.
2. Work on Modules Admin component (com_modules)
   1. Create Global configurations for module options
   2. Module Level ACL Future

After the successful completion of the project, my main goal is to provide the Joomla users with a better usability, and developers a better flexibility when coping with modules. New Joomla 3 modules have several new features and improvements to be done, all which I might not be able to address due to the time constraints of the project. But I’m planning to contribute to the Joomla Community even after completing the project.