As you all know, Joomla! 1.7 brought a major change in the direction of the project. The self-developed libraries upon which the Joomla! CMS is built on are now spun-off as a separate project, called Joomla! Platform. The goal of this split is to allow developers to built applications on the Joomla! Platform without having to install the Joomla! CMS and all the unnecessary cruft this brings with it. The vision is to have a standalone framework, much like Zend Framework, CakePHP, CodeIgniter or Symphony, with a twist. It will be equally easy to create a component for the Joomla! CMS, a standalone web application or a CLI (command-line) application without much changes in the source code or, at least, reusing big portions of it. A mighty, noble goal. Is it possible? Are we there yet? Is it worth it?

Maybe you have already tried Appcelerator’s Titanium. If not, you should have. It’s a very easy to use RAD framework for creating cross-platform desktop and mobile applications based on HTML, Javascript, PHP, Python and Ruby. However, I was having a grave issue lately with their desktop builds. No matter what, I could not build the Windows installation package of my applications. Appcelerator’s documentation on manually packaging applications is sketchy and outdated. So I did what any self-respecting hacker (in the good sense, i.e. geeky developer with a strong aspiration to solving complex problems) would. I figured out a solution myself and documented everything in the process.

Time over time, users make an unsurprising feature request on the AkeebaBackup.com forum: “Can you make it so that I can synchronize a live and dev site without a full backup?”. The typical answer they get is “No, because of technical issues”. I was surprised to see that a trending idea in ideas.joomla.org is exactly that – not to mention that it was submitted by one of the people very actively engaged with core Joomla! development. In the hope that anyone cares to read, I am going to make the case against such a feature, proving why it is a Really Bad Idea™.

Disclosure: I have the know-how to create such a feature and make it work on most servers and most sites. I even have code infrastructure in place to easily make it happen, without having to start from scratch. This article is a breakdown of my research and spec notes when I was doing the feasibility study of such a feature. After reading this lengthy article, you'll hopefully understand why I decided to never put it to code and, most likely, agree with my choice too.

When I roam around the open Internet I sometimes find myself in front of nasty surprises. No, I don't mean what you think... I see code written so badly which, despite the author's best intentions, manages to somehow introduce more problems than the single problem it tried to tackle. One such case was a set of patches regarding alternative layouts about to make it in Joomla! 1.6. Since the author of the patch doesn't get the damage caused, I'll take the challenge to explain it.

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.