Republished from http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/profiles/blogs/an-urgent-call-to-community.

For everyone who has read the latest Joomla! Developer Working Group notes, there is one thing which instantly became apparent: Joomla! is like a patient on life support.

Let me explain this as best as I can. The last major release of Joomla! was 1.5, made over two years ago. The code base is starting to show its age. There is an immediate need for a new release if Joomla! is not to lose anymore traction. However, there is a shortage of developers who work on the Joomla! 1.6 code base, in order to bring it out of the door any time soon.

How does this affect us? We are all professionals working with Joomla!, building Joomla! sites, developing Joomla! extensions, providing Joomla! training and support or creating Joomla! templates. Like it or not, our core business revolves around the CMS. Bluntly put, if Joomla! becomes irrelevant in the global web market, we become obsolete. Having Joomla! around for a long time to come is in our best interest. Even more, it is absolutely essential to our very existence.

This is where community involvement is necessary. We are the Joomla! Community. We have the development skills to help Joomla! get out of its current state of stagnancy and bring it back where it belongs: the front line of the global CMS market. However, we all know what happens when we do solo attempts to help the project. The bureaucracy we have to go through usually kills off our passion very quickly. But, there has always been a remedy for bureaucracy, known to the world for centuries.

Team play.

The plan is to get 10-20 developers and offer our help as a team. Bureaucracy can be tackled much more easily by volunteering en masse. ATAAW, a neutral ground where Joomla! developers share their concerns, will serve as our home base and provide us with the much needed community feedback. If you choose to join this effort, I can’t promise you glory and retribution. I do promise you a 5 hours per week schedule of bug hunting and fixing for each one of us, so as to get 1.6 out really soon. I firmly believe that once 1.6 is out, we can actively contribute to shaping 1.7 (or 2.0, version numbers don’t matter) to what we know that the market wants. Each one of us has a unique perspective. Let’s get this vision to a team level and make it happen. This is what all together, as a whole, really means.

There have already been volunteers, recruited from private contacts, willing to be part of this effort. But, our personal contacts are only so many. There are just a handful of us right now and we could really use some more. We need you. Joomla! needs you!

So, who’s with us?

You can sign yourself up to our effort at the forum thread we started for this purpose. For any question, remark and what not, just post a comment here.

On puplar request, I present you with an extension I wrote to the popular AMBRA.subscriptions component by Dioscouri Design in order to handle EU VAT in user subscriptions. As with all of my code, it's released under the GNU General Public License so that you can freely use it on any website. Read on for the details.

Analytics services have been around for a long time. The most well known being Google Analytics, they primarily focus on giving you all sort of details regarding site visitors' navigation trends around your site. This is essential marketing information, but they leave much to be desired.

CrazyEgg is a completely different kind of analytics service. Instead of telling you how your visitors navigate between pages of your site they answer for you the million dollar question: where exactly do all of those people click on my pages? This information is worth serious gold, as it is the only real measure of your site's design success. Normally, you'd need an expensive UX survey or an absolutely frustrating to set up Mechanical Turk UX experiment. Not any more. Just use CrazyEgg and they'll produce a heat map of your visitors' clicks on your page. I can't think of a better way to visualize where each user clicks on your page. I have actually used this service to redesign my sites to make important - but, apparently, hard to find - links to pages more visible and even improve my AdSense CTR and revenue by 200%!

The catch is that normally you need to install a special tracking Javascript code on your pages. I don't know what you think of that, but editing template files to add tracking codes is a big no-no for me. Therefore, this plug-in was born. It merely allows you to safely install the CrazyEgg tracking code by simply entering your CrazyEgg account ID number and enabling the plugin.

Installing the CrazyEgg Integration plugin for WordPress is not different than installing any other WordPress plugin. Begin by downloading the installer file. Then simply go to your WordPress administration area (wp-admin), choose the Plugins → Add New menu item on the left side bar, then click on the upload link on the top of the page. Click on Browse, select the plugin ZIP file and then click on Install Now. The next and final necessary step is configuring the plug-in.

Click on Plugins → CrazyEgg Configuration menu item in the left sidebar. In the configuration page,there is only one option, your CrazyEgg account ID. This is your numerical CrazyEgg account ID, consisting exclusively of 8 digits. The easy way to find it is by logging in to your CrazyEgg account and clicking the "What's my code"link:

In the new page, towards the bottom, you will find your Account ID number:

Type this number, including any leading zeros, in the plug-in's configuration field. When you're done click on Update Options. That's all!