7 Great Things that Will Happen to Joomla in the Near Future Business
Jessica Dunbar
Joomla! 3 has seen some great advances in the CMS as the project's contributors continue to innovate and bring in cutting edge features. In this session, we'll take a look at the new features Joomla! 3 and what the future of Joomla 4 will bring.
34. Joomla 3.5 Timeline
14 October beta 1
21 October beta 2
28 October - Release Candidate
4 November – 3.5 Stable
Joomla 3 and Beyond
JOOMLA! Tomorrow and Beyond
68. "Joomla! is a tool which enables
developers to build easily
maintainable sites, without
sacrificing form, function, or
power. "
READY TO START?
JOOMLA! Tomorrow and Beyond
70. "Joomla! is a tool which enables
developers to build easily
maintainable sites, without
sacrificing form, function, or
power. "
READY TO START?
JOOMLA! Tomorrow and Beyond
Hi Everyone. Thank you for having me speak here today. I’m Jessica Dunbar. I’ve been heavily invested in Joomla & technology for many years. Most of you may know me as our Marketing Lead for Joomla. I’m also a part of the PLT- Production Leadership team. responsible for coordinating the production of the Joomla CMS and Framework, including code, documentation, and localization I’m mainly work on marketing and communication.
and in all my free time we do things like redesign joomla.org
We are happy to announce the launch of the upgraded joomla.org website. Over the past two weeks we’ve been hard at work to upgrade joomla.org to the latest version.
We like to call it a belated birthday gift to Joomla.
As you review and use the new website you will find that it is now fully responsive, adds an additional layer of security with SSL based traffic, and is much easier to navigate.
besides all of that
But my actually day Job I’m a system administrator for Trivera interactive. An Agency based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA.
Thank-you for the invitation to speak here today. As you know, I’ll be speaking about Joomla , a Before I begin though, I’d like to know who’s all joining us at the bf
Accomplishments Of Joomla
Before I start discussing everythy for tomorrow and beyond lets take a moment to celebrate success and discuss why Joomla is so popular!
PHP Is a Great Programming Language - Joomla runs on PHP and MySQL - these are the most popular programming languages in their respective fields, and once again run the top three CMSs available.
PHP Is a Great Programming Language - Joomla runs on PHP and MySQL - these are the most popular programming languages in their respective fields, and once again run the top three CMSs available.
Last weekend The PLT a PHP conference in seattle
Joomla is sponsering phpmadison on november 14
Joomla Has over 65k downloads This is a huge milestone for the Joomla community that can be traced back to the tireless work of hundreds of thousands of contributors,
with Joomla it is really easy to use the software with the language of your choice. The Joomla community has produced a number of language packs for Joomla 3.x that you can use. All you have to do is download a language pack and add it to your installation.
If you have a Multilingual site use Joomla
Another reason Joomla is hugely popular today is because it has a massive selection of templates and plugins. Really this is one of the most important factors for its popularity. Why? The purpose of a CMS is to help users get things done quickly. The more plugins a CMS has, the more value it provides to people who use it. The more templates it has, the easier it is to get a new site up and running that looks how you want it to look. With thousands of different plugins, templates, and modules, components, and languages available, there is a level of efficiency a coder can achieve that is just not possible with many other CMSs.
One of Joomla's biggest strengths is it's strong and kick ass development team. It is made by a group of people with a strong commitment to promoting open source software. Without a strong development team, no piece of software is going to be very good to use, even if they have a strong marketing ability. The development team regularly pushes updates and takes security seriously meaning it is a reliable platform on which to build websites.
The Joomla developer community collaborates and contributes through its more than 2.8 million forum posts
668948 users on the forum - and every … seconds a new post is created
first developed in 2005. That means it has been around for about a decade now. Ten years is a long time to develop a project, and it means that the code base is mature, and also that the CMS has had good opportunity to saturate the market. With such a good head start, it has done well.
We’ve spent 10 years together! -
Together we can solve problems that no one person may be able to solve on their own. Together we learn from each other when information is open. Together we collaborate.
Together we formed a community with a common purpose, where we bring together ideas and share. We are a community that can create beautiful things beyond th e capabilities of any one person.
Together we do more….
What can you expect for the future of Joomla 3
The biggest question I get asked is: The question I get asked constantly is How long will Joomla 3 be supported?
Joomla 3 will be supported minimally until 2018
there will be at least two years of support for the last minor release of a series. For example, if 3.4 were to be the final minor release of the 3.x series, it would be supported for at least two years after its release.
We have 3.5 planned for september and 3.6 planned for january 2016 = 2018
Has everyone upgraded to joomla 3.4.4.? show of hands
As of right now we do not have any more mat. releases planned, but that can change at any time.
We are striving to speed up releases to reduce bugs.
What's in 3.4.4
Version 3.4.4 also addresses a few issues:
Further en-GB language cleanup
Fixes for MSSQL and PostgresSQL Joomla installations
jQuery, HTML5Shiv and CodeMirror updates
Finished implementing the Joomla codestyle rules
Thanks to the hard work of 36 different volunteer contributors more than 500 code commits, addressing over 245 issues, were made for the 3.4.4 release. See the list of fixed GitHub issues for details of the tracker items fixed.
Security Issues Fixed
Low Priority - Core - XSS Vulnerability More information »
Many users are always looking forward to a new version of their favorite software because it could bring them new shiny things to play with. Many website maintainers are less fond of new versions as they wonder what will break this time round. As a software developing and using community we believe the responsibility is in all our hands and not just of those creating the release. We ask for your active participation in testing all 3.5 pre-releases. This will ensure we can move smoothly to this new version.
Release Leader
The PLT is pleased to announce Roland Dalmulder as the Joomla 3.5 release leader.
The release leader works to encourage contributions for a particular release, drive attention to the patches needing to be tested, and ensuring that the features identified by Joomla on the roadmap for that particular release are addressed by volunteers eager to get involved.
Features
The big question is, what is new in Joomla 3.5? We have the following possible features:
Update emails plugin by Nicholas Dionysopoulos
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/6886
Joomla! issues bug fix and security updates every few weeks. However, many (most?) of its users are completely unaware of this fact unless they log in to the back-end of their site and notice the update nag message at the top. This PR adds a plugin which periodically checks for updated Joomla! versions and, when one is found, emails the Super Users of the site to remind them.
Router improvements by Hannes Papenberg
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/5444
This PR implements a new base class for component routers, which can be used to create rules based routers that are dynamically extendable.
Count items by Peter Martin
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/6916
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/6934
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/6938
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/6936
This PR adds the number of published, unpublished and trashed articles in the Category Manager for the articles, banners, contacts and newsfeeds.
this is what it looks like current
So aftter this is what it will look like
unpublished and trashed articles in the Category Manager for the articles, banners, contacts and newsfeeds.
Admin module User Status by Rick Spaan
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/7174
Adds switches to the mod_status module to show/hide links to the frontend and backend of the site.
Ability to add a user CSS file to Protostar by Roland Dalmulder
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/4211
Adds a check to see if the file user.css exists and loads the file to allow user customization.
Download system/environment information by Radek Suski and Roberto Segura
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/7129
Implementing a possibility to download system/environment information for support purposes.
TinyMCE drag and drop images by Dimitris Grammatiko
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/7435
Adds the ability to drag and drop images into the tinyMCE editor that comes with Joomla.
There is a spinning joomla gif to indicate that the upload is actually happening
Success image
Also if the image gets successfully uploaded a green overlay will indicate the success
The code also checks if the user is allowed to upload images.
If an error happened the error will display shortly on a red background
For files dropped that are not images nothing will happen
For images that the filename already exists on the server the upload will not happen and the image that is already in the server will appear in the tinyMCE content area.
Plugin to gather basic anonymized data as an opt-out feature by Don Gilbert
https://github.com/joomla-extensions/jstats-server
https://github.com/joomla-extensions/jstats-plugin
In order to better understand our install base and end user environments, this plugin has been created to send those stats back to a Joomla controlled central server. No identifying data is captured at any point.
One of stated goals for the last couple of years has been to try to understand our users better. In line with that goal, we want to better understand the sort of environments and platforms that people are using to install and run Joomla. This will enable us to make more informed decisions about which platforms we need to support, minimum version requirements, the pace at which we can encourage people to upgrade, and so on.
In order to gather this information we will be including a new plugin with the Joomla 3.5 release that will automatically gather some very basic data points, . This plugin will be enabled by default, but can be disabled at any point in time. A post-install message will be shown to make site owners aware that the plugin has been installed and will include instructions for disabling it.
The privacy of all Joomla users is important to us and we want to allay any fears that we are collecting personally identifying information. The source code for both the plugin and the server code that gathers the data can be seen in our GitHub repositories [links]. The plugin configuration screen will also show exactly what information is being shared by the plugin.
Access to the raw data collected will be restricted to [who?]. Only statistical results extracted from the data will be published on the developer.joomla.org website. Categories with small numbers of entries will be gathered into an "Other" category. The unique id used to prevent duplicate entries will be carefully generated to ensure that it cannot be used to deduce the identity of any individual site. These measures should ensure that individual websites cannot be identified from the published data.
The plugin will collect anonymously the PHP, Database Type and Version and Joomla Version a user is running so that the project can set PHP and MySQL versions more accurately for future Joomla Versions.
Backwards Compatibility break
We have a backwards compatibility promise to make sure code doesn’t suddenly break. However there are circumstances that can force us to no longer keep this promise. In Joomla 3.5 this is the case. Due to changes in PHP 7, we had to rename the String class to StringHelper otherwise Joomla! cannot run on PHP 7. This is a very minor change and we don’t expect any issues from it. For those interested, you can read more about it at Update to String package 1.3.
Timeline
As with anything, we need a timeline as to when all this will happen. The proposed timeline is as follows:
14 October beta 1
21 October beta 2
28 October - Release Candidate
4 November – 3.5 Stable
Joomla 3.6
Hypermedia API (web services).
Remove unnecessary sample data.
New MVC.
Translator experience improvements.
Estimated date: 1st quarter 2016
Joomla 3.7
Improve the installation experience.
New Media Manager.
Further extension decoupling.
Estimated date: 3rd quarter 2016
Apart from those items mentioned above, we will also be interested to see any contributions in the following areas:
Features to improve SEO.
A new administrator template with minimal options.
When ready these could be shipped with the next available release. Any other features not on this roadmap will be considered on their merit should they reach a mergeable state. The Roadmap is subject to change in the light of ongoing experience and will be formally reviewed at the next PLT Summit meeting currently scheduled for this weekend
There is a weblinks release. however this relies on George, Jess discussing the workflow for releasing core supported extensions. What I mean by that is shortly we many have as many as 10 core extensions once newsfeed, contacts etc. are removed from the core. Right now our releases are manual, and take a considerable amount of time. Second, notifications. ….
The team members agreed to investigate having a release leader responsible for Core Supported Extensions.
Roland, Robert and Javier will also look at making a Phing or Gulp script to automate more of the release process for Joomla.
Weblinks Version 3.4.1 fixes the script not being run therefore breaking weblinks for sites upgraded from old 2.5 versions of Joomla.
there is a new release
If you ask ten people what Joomla! 4 is you’ll get ten different answers. So I asked a few people what joomla 4 is.
Stable.
Tessa Mero
Kinda like 3 but newer.
Some separation of web vs action.
(so we can blog via the CLI)
Jeff Channel
It is critical that Joomla fits in a space that solves problems and truly differentiates itself from WordPress and Drupal
Robert Jacobi
Fucking Secure -
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
CVE is a dictionary of publicly known information security vulnerabilities and exposures.
CVE’s common identifiers enable data exchange between security products and provide a baseline index point for evaluating coverage of tools and services.
- Unique database of vulnerabilities
Identified by ID CVE-YYYY-NNNNN
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would of said faster horses - Henry Ford - our users don’t know what they want.
Reclaiming our heritage
Mambo started with a claim to offer Power with Simplicity
At some point over the last 10 years we’ve lost that.
We’ve added features because they were cool without considering if they were useful. We’ve added features before they were ready because of a deadline, we’ve added features because they were offered without thinking if anyone wanted them.
Joomla 4 is our opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past. Not by blaming anyone for mistakes or failures but by grabbing the opportunity to reclaim our heritage.
History is useful but only to ensure that we don't repeat mistakes of the past. With Joomla 4 we should, no we must, be prepared to re-imagine everything.
Before we can do any of that we must finally have a vision for the software that we all love.
The vision statement should be lived daily by everyone. It should be communicated directly and indirectly by how joomla acts and talks about itself.
Leaders may change, but a clearly established Vision encourages people to focus on what's important and better understand organization-wide change and alignment of resources. We need to hyper focus on focusing.
When we have that vision we can then start to build Joomla 4 to achieve that vision. So what is that vision?
Joomla is software to create content online
Joomla works on the widest range of MODERN technology stacks
Joomla is extendable, expandable and customisable
Joomla is created by a community of volunteers who share this vision.
Joomla is multilingual
Joomla Combines Power with Simplicity
From vision to reality
Last month a group of developers had an architecture sprint.
don't forget that we have 4 survivors of Ronni's Chilli Con Carne From Hell (seriously, he used a chilli called Carolina Reaper), one who couldn't take it and one who chickened out
I don’t know what it should have but I do know how we decide
Does featureA fit the vision?
That should be the only consideration. Not who made it, how long they spent making it or even that people have asked for it in the past, or even that joomla has always had this feature.
If it doesn't fit the vision then its not a feature and doesn't become a core feature of joomla 4.
Development status should always reflect reality. - We don’t have any code yet. planning is underway and being taken seriously. Features is work in progress and will be published at the earliest possible moment
To kick off this process, we are rebooted Joomla! UX Team. This team is underneath the Production Leadership Team, and our first project will have major influence in how Joomla! 4 looks and functions from an end-user standpoint.
Crystal is leading the ux team - i’d like to give her a min to discuss that
Joomla 4 UX Team
Over the past 10 years Joomla has been growing organically - if someone was passionate about a feature and developed it, the chances were high it would get included in the next release.
That's been working mostly okay for us so far - Joomla is a wonderful CMS. However, as Jess mentioned earlier, somewhere along the way we lost our heritage.
Power in simplicity
Part of the UX team's job is to guide us to a clearer vision, not just through Joomla 4, but future versions and our presence on the web.
To do this, we are refining "power in simplicity" into a statement that allows us to see the future clearly, not in terms of specific technology, but in terms of how we will differentiate ourselves. It also helps us make decisions as we go along.
"Joomla! is a tool which enables developers to build easily maintainable sites, without sacrificing form, function, or power. "
This statement is a result of our combined experiences working with and around joomla, as well as interviews with several other users.
Each of us has a different idea for what joomla should be - we are picking the common thread and defining it.
Remembering the users
One huge thing we have noticed so far is that while Joomla isn't necessarily easy for developers, it's learnable. However, for your clients, what should be simple tasks suddenly become impossible.
There are a few talks today about UX, and improving usability for your clients. But should you really have to install another component or make changes to the template to do something so simple?
In my opinion, no.
My personal goals for Joomla 4 are very much in line with the vision statement above.
"Joomla! is a tool which enables developers to build easily maintainable sites, without sacrificing form, function, or power. "
I want to enable you as developers to make powerful sites without having to worry so much about training your clients, or modifying each and every admin template to make it more intuitive.
The UX team is still working out the specifics of how that will work, but as you can imagine, it's a big task.
Wanna help?
.... And we'd love your help.
If you'd like to get involved, particularly if you have experience in the UX industry, there are a few different ways.
First, if you just have general ideas on how the interface or work flows can be improved, we have a Google spreadsheet where you can add your ideas and see what others added.
Second, if you're in Glip, there is a room called "General UX Chatter" where we are discussing all these ideas and more. This is also where other UX projects will be announced in the future.
And finally, if you'd like to be directly involved, there is an application for the UX team which you can access from that link.
If you have any questions about UX or how it will play into the future of Joomla, my email is above.
How do we represent our target audience to make valuable decisions?
Decision
Personas will be created for each class of stakeholder. They should also cover the combined “Site owner / Site builder / Backend user” sufficiently. The personas are published to the community to use them as “User Patterns”, similar to “Design Patterns” in software development.
Reason
Personas help to focus on the needs of our users and other stakeholders.
References
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_%28user_experience%29 for more detailled information.
I’ve been actively presenting data on features. we just had a huge discussion on if we should support ie8
Migration
Decision
Supporting migration shall be an integral part of every deliverable in the context of Joomla! architecture, implementation and new features.
Reason
We want to deliver a non frustrating migration experience: migration without frustration.
Inform and educate 3rd party developers
Decision
Provide documentation and guidance for 3rd party developers to migrate their extensions. This is both a marketing and technical challenge.
Reason
We want to deliver a non frustrating migration experience
- its worth noting the plt is having our sprint one of the most important tasks we have set ourselves for the PLT Summit in September
We also want to do an Architecture Sprint/code sprint in octomber 2015 to try to get a clear architectural vision for Joomla 4 in place.
in closing My challenge to us all
twodaysamonth - thats half a day a week. Is there anyone here that doesn't think it is worth them investing that time into the future of Joomla. It is our shared future and we should share in the effort. And not just your personal time but your company time and the time of your employees. I know many of you will contribute far more than that - but lets today pledge twodaysamonth as a minimum.
RT and change your name I, Jessica Dunbar, pledge my #twodaysamonth
RT and change your name I, Jessica Dunbar, pledge my #twodaysamonth