Well, I don’t think anyone missed it, but in case you did, we have now successfully migrated the Joomla Community Forum from SMF to Phpbb3. All posts, all user accounts, everything. It’s been a huge job, and a special thanks must go out to all those who chipped in to help me. Thanks also to all of you for your patience. So, a few questions arise as a result:

Why did we move to Phpbb3?
Good question, and there is a simple answer. Whilst SMF was great for us, it is not licensed under GPL, and as a result many of our users who like to follow the choices we make were going to run in to integration issues in the future. As well as that, the team at Phpbb have been great, with many of them offering to help, especially with the conversion.
In any case, we’re not going back, and the future is Phpbb3!

What has been done to Phpbb3 to make it suitable to our use?
Not much. We have had to convert a number of the larger frequently used database tables to INNODB. A few ‘tweaks’ have been made to Apache and Mysql, as well as APC for php caching. You may have noticed issues with the built in phpbb search not having an index of all the posts, however that has now been resolved with the installation of Sphinx. Special thanks to Nils from Phpbb who essentially coded this for us, but will also allow others sites to benefit from it in the future.

What about the future?
There is still much to be done with the current setup. There are a number of modifications we’d like to make, but for now, the forum is faster, searching is brilliant and moderating is so much better in Phpbb3. (BTW you can all help the moderators by using the ‘report this post’ icon found on all posts (*see icon below) to report any posts that break the forum rules and/or are posted in the wrong place etc. We really appreciate you help with this as it lightens the moderators load.) There will be UI/template changes in the future. As you’d expect we’d like to change all the official sites to a new fresh look, including the forum.

In other things.
A few weeks ago, while in Melbourne attending the JoomlaDay, one of the presentations caught my eye as something that may be especially useful to Joomla users in the future. You can see the Video Presentation here. This Extension for Joomla is also now available on the JED here. You will want to look deeper into the integration options, but essentially an excellent open source/GPL Shopping Cart is now able to be integrated with Joomla 1.5 and 1.0 pretty seamlessly.

Also…

I have it on good authority that out official Joomla Demo Site will be back soon. We’ll be sure to let you know about that when it happens.

Ok, that’s it until the S&I monthly report in a few days. Again, thanks to all users for their patience while we migrated the forum and ironed out the issues.

Source: Joomla.org

XHTMLSuites announces a Joomla! 1.5 compatibility patch for their Standard and special 508 text editor edititions.

Source: facedancer

This one was actually announced a couple of days ago, so you don't have a lot of time to get…

Source: facedancer

JoomlaWorks has created a Product Download System (PDS) to facilitate their distribution of their commercial extensions to their clients.

Source: facedancer

After a looooong time awaiting, many broken deadlines and a minor riot on the JoomlaWorks forums, version 1.7 of their…

Source: facedancer

JoomlArt has had a good track record when it comes to releasing quality templates and Corona is not an exception.

Source: facedancer

Although this is hardly a hot off the presses news release, we felt the need to write a little tidbit…

Source: facedancer

The Joomla! Project now announces the immediate release of Joomla! 1.0.15 [Daytime].

Source: facedancer

It has been a long time in the making, dividing our times between Joomla Views and several other theme specific…

Source: facedancer

As mentioned in the security announcement of Joomla! 1.5.0 (Khepri) the creation of Joomla! 1.5.1 (Seenu) came sooner then planned. Within the Bug Squad and the Development team we try to create a release cycle that takes 4-6 weeks, just to prevent our users to go through a regular update process. There are of course people who use the nightly build or the version that is held in our Subversion Repository on Joomla!code but these people most of the time exactly know what they do, and what the risks are using these versions.

Some people have asked me what it takes to create a release and why it takes several days (or weeks) to build a release package and announce it. I certainly want to share a bit more because this time the 1.5.1 packages seemed to be released earlier then the announcement was out, and this caused some confusion.
The reason the 1.5.1 packages seemed to be visible earlier is due to a problem we have with the file section on GForge. Not only did hidden packages pop up, the packages for 1.0.13 (full release) disappeared from the list. This is a problem that we try to solve with GForge, but the initial packages where already visible days before the release. We noticed this when we saw they where already downloaded around 2.000 times

We follow a basic series of steps during a release cycle. A code freeze most of the times marks the start of the release cycle, we have documented the process in the release procedure and checklist on the documentation wiki. A code freeze marks the start, but it does not say anything about the time needed to actually release a package. When you take a look at the initial freeze of Joomla! 1.5.0 it took us a full two weeks before we could release, with 1.5.1 it took us 4 days in total. The amount of time needed depends mainly on the tests results that we do in between when we package, the rest of the time is needed on logistics (download section, announcement, checking with other work-groups etc).

Issues in Seenu

Within Joomla! 1.5.1 there are two minor issues found. The first problem is when you update from Joomla! 1.5.0 to 1.5.1. When you upgrade, there is no $live_site in configuration.php. When you have error reporting enabled (set to max) on the server or in global configuration and then go into global configuration after updating, PHP throws a notice as the value of $live_site. When then saving the configuration, instead of the live_site you save the error message. So either first switch off error reporting and then upgrade, go to global config and click save, or edit configuration.php by hand later. This problem already is solved in the code-base, but when you encounter this problem you need to manually change the variable in the configuration file to solve this issue.

People will surely want to know why we have added this new variable to the global configuration. The purpose of this variable, is to rectify SEF issues for servers having the base URI problem. You can put a full URL in the $live_site variable, and it will override Joomla’s default behavior of detecting the base URL for the site. Anthony Ferrera (development team member and Joomla! 1.5 team lead of the Bug Squad) has written a
forum post that explains this in more detail.

The second problem is a real small issue. The version rendered in the back-end (cpanel) still shows 1.5.0 despite the fact that the version file has the proper versioninformation. This problem is also fixed in the code, but is not part of the 1.5.1 package. If you think that you have found other problems you can always use the forum to discuss the circumstances under which the problem occurs, or post a an artifacts into our tracker. For those who might want to know how we work, a brief description of the way we work is documented in the Joomla! maintenance procedure description of our documentation wiki.

What is the plan for Joomla! 1.0.14 and 1.5.2?

Some will have noticed that we have frozen the code-base for Joomla! 1.0. This means we are looking at the final things that need to be solved before we can release this version. Beside the cross-site script problem we fixed, numerous small issues have been fixed. More details will be shared in the release announcement.
Within the 1.5.2 maintenance version we will focus on mainly two topics; open-id and all language related issues will be our main focus. Of course we will solve other issues as well. For 1.5.3 we will set some new goals, depending on what is reported in the forums and the tracker.

Source: willebil