15 May 2010 |
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If you liked the way that this interview went, you can follow me for more Joomla and Palm webOS Developer Interviews at @twintrview or #twtv. 1. Before we begin, what resources are currently available for people to view about the upcoming 1.6 beta release?Resources are a bit scarce for the user, admins and devs at the moment. We have been waiting for the goalposts to stop shifting. Now that the feature freeze is passed, we can start taking stock. Chris [Davenport] has started the help screen documentation. And I'm going to be recording some talks this weekend for administrator and developers. 2. The team has been working a pretty long time on this release (almost a year). With all due respect, what s taken so long?Thought that first question was too easy :) Ok, so Joomla 1.5 was released, what, January 2008? The release itself was extremely successful, but one mistake we made as a project was delay starting the next version for some months. Letting the development engines cool meant we lost momentum and it took a while to start them all up again. So in very late 2008 we started to get the ball rolling again. 2009 saw a lot of activity and in the recent months, we have seen the development groove really start to kick in again. So, yes, it s taken a *long* time to get here, but the upside is we have solved some things better than we would have in the past. 3. Without jumping ahead of myself, does this mean that we should see more effective releases more often in the near future?Certainly after Joomla 1.6 goes GA (General Availability) we are radically changing the way we do releases. They will become time based, about 6 months apart and we will be making internal changes to processes to enable this. 4. The core dev team has put in a lot of effort with the #Joomla 1.6 Beta release; what would you say has been a primary focus for them?There have been a couple of parallel areas of focus in 1.6. The first is obviously bringing in long asked for features, like better access controls, unlocking the chains of the 2 level section-category system, user groups and so on. Another area of focus has been bring as much of the core code up to the same standard as possible. In 1.5, we have a variety of different extensions coded in different ways and I can appreciate how hard it is for a developer to work out which is the "Joomla way". So we have put a lot of effort into that. Finally, the core frontend output has needed a shakeup for quite some time, and it was time to do something about it in this release. We have had the same output since Mambo 4.5.2 really and things have changed a little since that was released :) So bringing Joomla up to standard with good, semantic output is a huge plus. 5. With changes coming that make Joomla more standards compliant, what kind of changes will 3rd Party Devs have to make to extensions?There arent a lot of mandatory changes for developers to be able to have their extensions install. The installer XML file needs to have a specific name now, the old <params> blocks need to be changed to <fields>, and a few other minor things. The PHP side of templates wont change, but obviously template designers will have to take into account the new default markup 6. With what seems to be an emphasis on the backend, have you been able to create a consistent workflow with the ACL, Menu Manager, etc?I think the workflow is a better but certainly there is still much room for improvement. There are some changes with templates, modules and menus that make working within their connected relationships a bit more sane. Access controls are divided into levels where you can opt into as little or as much complexity as you want. We wanted to a cake-and-eat-it solution that was as simple as 1.5 yet has the power to drill down deeply into the category, or even the article for fine permissions control. It is taken us 5 years to redo the access control so I would be surprised if we nailed it perfectly first time :) But I think we have got an amazing start, and something quite different from your typical matrix tick-and-flick systems you see in other CMS s. 7. Has anything from GSOC (Google Summer of Code) made it into this release?I have to feign ignorance on that one unfortunately. I think we have some work based on GSOC in 1.6 but I couldnt point you to line numbers or anything. 8. Once this version is released (can we get a date?) How would you like to see the community contribute to making it a success?I dont have a date, but what I can say is once the beta is released, we then go to fixed 2-week releases for the next beta, then progress to the RC (release candidate stage) - which by the way is when we say it s ready for production use - then we declare GA. So all I can say is 1.6 GA will be released some multiple of 2-weeks after the beta is released. During beta to GA the community can contribute in 2 ways. The first is helping in the JBS (Joomla Bug Squad) to stabilise 1.6 but the other way is to continue to work in branches on new features that can be rolled into 1.7 after 1.6 is out. After 1.6 GA is released, the feature submissions will be reopened and there will be a process to get those accepted into the core. One huge point Id like to stress is you dont have to be a dev to help out. There are jobs for many different skill sets. 9. A follower asked this: Will we be able to develop extensions that work in both 1.5 and 1.6 natively?Yeah, that s a really good question. I think it will be possible, but not easy by any stretch. And the reason is you are going to have so many new toys to play with in 1.6, that supporting 1.5 "as well" will mean either a lot of duplicate code, or you are going to have to hobble or dumb-down your 1.6 extension to stay at a 1.5 standard. I personally would start thinking about making the break now, leave your 1.5 extensions as they are and start fresh in the "1.6 way" because that way is going to ultimately overtake the old 1.5 sites in a year or so. 10. From a follower: 1.0 to 1.5 upgrade was a nightmare. How will it be for 1.5 to 1.6?Ok, the upgrade question :) The short answer is we dont know yet and the PLT made a decision not to worry about it until after the beta is released. No point in doing anything until the goal posts stopped moving. My "thoughts" are we will have something that installs in a 1.5 site, you press a button and it does all the database changes, cleans up files, etc. But that s only a guess. Obviously we still have the problem of extensions limiting when an individual can upgrade, and that s always difficult to solve. Given the changes in 1.6 I think, like 1.5, it s going to be 6 months before we see serious uptake of that version. The 1.6, 1.7, 1.8 versions will be far "closer" in design to we will avoid these big leaps in design and functionality. And 1.5 is supported for 12 months after 1.6 GA is released, so there is plenty of time, and also an opportunity for people to "skip" a version if that suits. Great. Well, thanks very much for your time, Andrew. Any last words?Thanks a lot for inviting me, and if you are in Toowoomba on Saturday, rock up to my 1.6 talks :) Comments (10)
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