Archive for the Team Category
Behind the Joomlatools curtain
The beginning of 2011 introduced three new faces in the Joomlatools scene – Israel Canasa, Ercan Ozkaya and Myra Jill Siason. Three vibrant, young, passionate experts in their own fields who have joined our team since February to bring you the next big thing: DOCman 2.0!
Israel and Ercan are taking charge of the DOCman 2.0 development while Myra is making sure sure that the team is running smoothly. Together with our Joomlatools regulars, we tripled our team size to bring you the best document manager for Joomla ever!
DOCman 2.0 is completely being re-written from scratch and built on-top of the Nooku Framework. It will work on both Joomla 1.5 & Joomla 1.6.
Distributed across Europe, Asia and Australia
One unique feature of the team is the distributed nature of its members. The whole team is spread out across three continents – Europe, Asia & Australia. This has not become a hindrance but rather an asset, talent knows no boundaries.
Managing a distributed team is not easy, but all together we make it work. Essential to the process is proper and efficient use of online collaboration tools. For the project workspace, we use Assembla. Over the past 2 months we have been working on DOCman 2.0 in iterations of two weeks. We have taken Agile development strategies, tailor fitted them to the Joomlatools philosophy and have made them our own.
Amaze your friends!
Along with our revamped Nooku.org site, we also opened the new Nooku Blog. This way we can keep things nicely separated. So if you want to stay up to date with both DOCman and Nooku, subscribe to both http://feeds.nooku.org/blog and http://feeds.joomlatools.eu/site/blog.
You’ll amaze your friends and enemies with your knowledge of Joomla, and you’ll read about our ideas and thoughts for the Joomlasphere. And if you think we’re wrong, feel free to tell us so in the comments!
Joomlatools is growing
Over the past 3 years Joomlatools has gone from strength to strength. Founded by Joomla Co-founder Johan Janssens and DOCman Lead Developer Mathias Verraes we soon grew with the addition of two more Joomla Co-Founders Peter Russell and Shayne Bartlett.
We now find ourselves expanding yet again, so it is with great pleasure that we announce two fantastic additions to the Joomlatools team.
Tom Janssens (yes… he’s Johan’s little brother) joins us as a Webmaster/Designer. Tom holds a Bachelors Degree in Information and Communications Technology. Tom is one of those talented people that can both code and design. For more on Tom visit his bio
Krisstoffer is already well known to DOCman users with his volunteer work in the DOCman forums over the past few years. With DOCman’s move to commercial GPL, Kriss has come on the team to continue this role with the position of Support Engineer. For more on Kriss visit his full bio
Finally we would like to thank our users and partners for their continued support, without it we would not be growing. We are committing ourselves to you and ensuring you receive the best solutions and support possible.
We’re hiring!
Nooku’s on the hunt for a talented junior/intermediate PHP developer with all the skills to fill a 2-3 month contract working on custom Nooku Framework/Joomla! projects. Ideally you’ll have a solid background in PHP, associated technologies as well as some familiarity with Joomla.
100 posts and counting
Little over a year ago we published our first ‘Hello world‘ post. More then 100 posts later our feed has been viewed over 100.000 times and we had 30.000 individual clicks on our blog posts. A big thanks to all of you who started following us in the past year !
We talked on a variety of topics, from Joomla tips and tricks to brainstorming ideas, our bootcamps and off course updates about our own products. I did a bit of digging in our archives and compiled a list of the 10 most read posts based on different statistics :
- Beautiful Joomla Sites
- Letterman
- Super Secret Sitemap Trick
- Joomla 1.0 end of life
- Hidden feature : Joomla’s media folder
- Using joomla as an intranet
- High leven security vulnerability
- Joomladat NL 2008- Debugging Joomla
- Saying goodbye to an old friend
- SITEman goes Google documents
We also saw many of you comment on our posts, sometimes because you where excited other times because you didn’t agree. We hope to see more of you voice their thoughts in the future. At Joomlatools we believe that a sign of an healthy community is the way it’s capable of discussing it’s ideas. Here is a list of the most commented on posts :
- Joomla.org : the lost sites
- Searching & Filtering in SITEman
- Nooku 0.6 : pushing Joomla to it’s limits
- Johan Janssens recognised as CMS most valued person
- Are white papers really helping Joomla ? (comments got lost during migration to disqus)
What can you expect from us next year ? More on that in a follow-up blog post.
Follow us on twitter
If you just can’t get enough of us here, we’ve also been broadcasting out into the Twittersphere with our Joomlatools account.
If you’re not in the know, Twitter is a microblogging service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite people (hopefully us) on multiple networks and devices. We will be twitting about interesting stuff we are reading on the web and writing on our blog and offcourse keep you updated on what is happening in the Joomlatools HQ. Feel free to @ us with shoutouts and questions!
Johan Janssens recognised as CMS “Most Valued Person”
I’m sure Packt Publishing needs no introduction. They published nine books on Joomla so far,
donate portions of their sales back to Joomla, and organize yearly open source awards. Joomla has taken home a bunch of these awards in the past (is anyone keeping track?). This week the 2008 winners will be announced.
Joomla 1.5′s Lead Architect
This year, a new category was added: “Open Source CMS Most Valued Person“. I’m pleased to announce that our own Johan Janssens was selected for his work on Joomla by his community peers. Johan is one of the co-founders of Joomla, and has led the development of Joomla 1.5. Thanks to his efforts, Joomla has moved away from the spaghetti code it inherited from Mambo, and now has a super-flexible, object-oriented framework.
With almost 3500 commits (aka code changes or additions in the code repository), Johan has written more Joomla than anyone else, and it’s gonna take a while before anyone catches up. He’s also a top 10 poster in the official Joomla forums, spoke at numerous events, helped set up structures like the working groups and OSM, and led the development working group
That’s why I’m extremely proud to be working alongside Johan on Nooku. He always has great ideas, knows more about software architecture than anyone I’ve ever met, and he’s always happy to share his knowledge.
It’s just the beginning
What can you expect from Johan in the future? Let me just say this: if you paid close attention, you already figured out that Nooku is not going to be ‘just’ a multilingual extension for Joomla, and it’s even going to be very useful for mono-lingual sites. You’ve come to expect great things from Johan, and we’re not settling for anything less. Stick around for some surprises about the upcoming Nooku 0.6.
Translating our blog posts
It’s been eight months since Johan posted the very first entry on the blog, and this one is already number 65. We noticed that every now and then, someone mentions one of our posts, reuses information, or translates an item for a local community site. Of course, we love that! To further encourage this, we decided to relicense all our posts under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (unless stated otherwise).
What does it mean? This license gives you a couple of freedoms:
- You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work
- You are free to remix or adapt the work (this includes translating it)
There are of course a couple of conditions, to make sure everybody plays fair:
- You must attribute the work to us, by adding ‘Originally written by [AUTHOR] at [LINK TO ORIGINAL POST]
- You can’t use our work for commercial purposes
- Whatever you do, your resulting must be licensed under the same license
You can read the full license or the short version at the Creative Commons site.
If you adapt, reuse or translate one of our posts, we’d love to hear about it! Just post a link in the comments of the original post. Not only will this help us to know what’s happening with our posts, it will also point people who are interested to your site. I’ve collected some links below:
German:
Italian:
Dutch:
Hungarian:
Shayne Bartlett joins Joomlatools
Joomlatools is delighted to announce a third founding member of Joomla! is joining our team. Shayne Bartlett, a New Zealander who hails from Albany, Australia, brings a wealth of experience in all things Joomla! and global contacts in the web industry. Apart from his amazing contribution to Joomla! as a core member as Project Manager and a board member of Open Source Matters, Shayne was a Mambo project core team member too.
Letterman
Shayne brings the ever-popular newsletter extension for Joomla!, Letterman. Letterman, which was originally developed by Sören Eberharter (of Virtue Mart fame), is very close to release its 1.5 native incarnation — Letterman2.
Shayne says he believes the addition of Letterman2 to the Joomlatools suite further demonstrates our commitment to providing some of the most professional code to the Joomla! marketplace.
Joining the team
“I’m really excited to be part of the Joomlatools team,” he said. “There is no doubting the massive contributions made by Joomla’s principal architect, Johan Janssens and marketing / media guru Pete Russell. They and fellow Joomlatools founders Mathias Verraes and Laurens Vanderput exemplify what open source is all about … the quality code, professionalism and fun just about says it all!”
Shayne, a Kiwi (New Zealander) is engaged to be married early in 2009 with two step children and a two year old son. He is also director of Ramped Technology, a leading Western Australian network management company. You could say he’s always busy and we’re delighted he’s found some time to share with Joomlatools.
Our open development approach
Software engineering is the practice of using selected process techniques to improve the quality of a software development effort. This is based on the assumption that a methodical approach to software development results in fewer defects and, ultimately, shorter delivery times and better value. The collection of policies, processes and procedures used to practice software engineering is called its software development methodology (SDM).
There are a lot of SDMs. The oldest, and most frequently used one is the one where the client defines his requirements. Based on these requirements an extensive analysis (UML diagrams, workflow diagrams, …), is made. Once these steps are completed a development team starts developing on a first version, and after 9 to 12 months a first version will be shown to the client. The steps I described are some steps from the waterfall model, a sequential software development model.
Working with such an SDM could work in a big software factory, but not in open source projects. For open source projects — as well as closed source projects, there’s an SDM that could be better suited: agile software development.
Agile software development
Agile software development is an SDM that promotes development iterations throughout the life-cycle of the project. The modern definition of agile software development evolved in the mid 1990s as a part of a reaction against “heavyweight” methods. The use of the waterfall model were seen as bureaucratic, slow and inconsistent with the ways that software developers actually perform effective work. Therefore, agile methods were also called “lightweight methods”.
Agile methods are a family of development processes — not a single approach of software development. Some of the principles of the Agile Manifesto are:
- user satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
- working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
- even late changes in requirements are welcomed
- simplicity
- close cooperation between end-user and developers
- projects are built around motivated individuals — who should be trusted
- regular adaption to changing circumstances
It quickly becomes clear that working versions of the software are delivered on a regular basis. This shows that iterative development is one of the key aspects of agile software development. Analysts don’t create an extensive analysis document. Instead, the end user creates user stories. Once the user stories are finished, developers pick their user story and start implementing them. Once the iteration is done (which can be from 1 to 4 weeks) a working version of the software is deployed. This version will be shown to the client, and based on his input on the current version, the software gets modified.
By using iterative development, defects will be rapidly detected, as well as the changing needs of the client. Also, the client will be heavily involved in the development process. Also, this has as a consequence that there is a continuous integration: the build must be working at every moment, because implementations of other developers are dependent on your code.
At Joomlatools we are heavy proponents of agile development. Each of our client development projects gets it own “incubator-project” and divide the development into iterations or milestones of 2-4weeks depending on the nature and scope of the project. Right before each iteration ends, we deliver a working build of the project to the client.
This has a number of advantages: the client is heavily involved — even clients with a lack of technical know-how. A second advantage is that requirement changes can be made after each iteration at very low costs. We just needs to make sure that we can provide a working version at the end of each iteration, and that’s it! A certain milestone could only have implemented 5% of the initial goals, which isn’t a problem. By releasing often and early main defects detection and client input are increased enormously. After all, isn’t this what open source development is all about?
