The Joomla! project
Why community matters!
Webcast Summer Of Code 2009
Wilco Jansen
May 22, 2009

What are we going to talk about?
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What are we going to talk about?
A project like Joomla can only be achieved
with an active community, in case of Joomla!
the FOSS philosophy is used and the project
materialized by the GPL

The beginning…
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On 31 August 2005
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On 27 April 2009
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User Groups Around the world
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To boldly go where no one has gone before?
• 4.640.631 visitors and 24.235.484 page
hits past month
• 1.611.740 posts, 360.683 topics and
276.761 users in our forum
• Almost 10.000.000 download
• 82.000 registered developers and 2.255
registered projects on Joomlacode
• 4.688 registered (active) projects on our
extensions site
• 60+ supported languages

To boldly go where no one has gone before?

To boldly go where no one has gone before?
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The key for the growth of Joomla!
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The licence
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Community
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Leadership

“All together”

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The Summer of Code link

5th year Google Summer of Code
2005 – 6 projects
2006 – 8 projects
2007 – 10 projects
2008 – 15 projects
and...

18 projects accepted!

Lessons learned (mentor version)
• Let the student make a plan before start
• Talk every week on work at hand, and work planned next week,
keep a constant eye on the schedule
• As mid-term approached (6-12 July), make sure coding starts in
time (23 May according to Google, but start earlier on if possible!
• Summer hollidays are parallel with SoC...students will dissapear,
and re-emerge!
• No code during mid-term = 100% failure in the end
• An active way motivating involvement is to let the students
actively blog
• The ambition level of every project so far has proven to be to
high, accept lesser work completed, better some stages finished
well then have nothing in the end
• Some students are new to open source, make sure they
understand the do's and don't in FOSS projects
• Always remember this should be a learning expierence by
students!

Lessons learned (student version)
• Plan first, then act! See also mentor remarks
• Handle SoC as a full time job, you are getting payed ;-)
• Time needed to complete code is always short, start soon and set
reasonable milestones
• You mentor is there to help, use their knowledge!
• Use the tools provided to interact with other mentors and
students (Skype chat is a good source)
• No code = fail mid/end-term, no code at mid-term is also fail, make
sure to start coding and go through the results at least once per 2
weeks with your mentor
• Learn from others, there are plenty of examples out there
• If you use work from others, make sure you add a comment