Joomla! Community Magazine™

On April 8, Open Source Matters, Inc. elected its new president, Sarah Watz. Sarah had served on the board for two years, leading the Certification program effort before taking on this new role.

A couple of days ago I came across yet another article announcing the decline of Joomla and the ascension of WordPress. As an admirer of the author's past work and presentations, at first I expected this would be some kind of fun article. I was astonished to read a serious article, where WordPress, Wix, Orkut, Facebook, journalists, and digital media agencies were cited as an anticipation of Joomla's demise.

How does one build a website for crowd-sourcing citizens and law enforcement agencies to better fight crime? With Joomla! of course! “You can’t outrun the click of a mouse…”

One of the most exciting areas of involvement for Joomla has been the participation of young Joomla programmers in Google Summer of Code. Their work has helped to make the software better, and has contributed to numerous articles in this magazine detailing their projects. Chad Windnagle has been coordinating this effort for the past couple of years, and he kindly took the time to sit down for an interview...

The last two weeks were very interesting for me. I've gotten involved in the Joomla! Marketing team, and as my first assignment, I got to know a few very inspiring women who are part of the Joomla! Leadership.      

Last summer, I was lucky enough to inherit many of the responsibilities as it pertains to coordinating and executing releases of the Joomla! CMS. Little did I know at the time, but there are a lot of details and individuals involved in the full release cycle. So, what exactly goes into making a release of the CMS?

Instead of the normal, common New Year's resolutions so many attempt to attain like shedding some pounds, eating better and curbing work-o-holic tendencies, I've come up with a few Joomla-based resolutions that are EASY to attain.

The 2nd Joomla! World Conference was held last month. Last year in San Jose there were keynote speakers from major open source names such as MySQL and Mozilla. This year the team went a step further and invited a speaker from WordPress. Matt Mullenweg is one of the two co-founders of WordPress and also the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

This month I had the opportunity to go to a tech conference and talk about Joomla!, Open Source Communities, and Education – nothing unusual for me, I do that all the time at colleges and Joomla! events around the United States and elsewhere. But this time was different, because I was showing up to an event I’d never been to, a WordCamp. The most common questions I got almost non-stop for two days? “Why in the world are you here?” and “Isn’t this ‘enemy territory’ for you?” Here’s what I said, and why I went, and why I’m definitely going to go to more events in other Open Source communities.

I've long believed in the virtues of Open Source. I'm not well known in the Joomla community, I haven't spoken at any Joomla events or worked on the core project, but I've always tried to do my part: proselytizing Joomla, providing free (anonymous) tech support to new users, and donating beer money to promising developers. But there was always a blind spot. I'd like to tell you about the time I failed Joomla and didn't even know it.