In the March 2013 Open Source Matters (OSM) board meeting, the board voted to accept changes to the OSM bylaws that were proposed by the Community Oversight Committee (COC) upon their dissolution. For more details about those proposed changes, please read this previous blog and the public forum discussion.

By voting to accept those proposed changes to the OSM bylaws, OSM has become a self-governing group. In simple terms, this means that OSM is now empowered to add and remove board members on its own, without the approval that was previously required by the COC.

Since 2010 the VEL team have organised the Vulnerable Extensions List on behalf of the Joomla community. Since then the list has been hosted on the docs.joomla.org pages.The VEL team felt that now was the time to move the vel project onto its own website.

The Vulnerable Extensions List team is looking for new members.

Those interested do not need to know how to code or be a developer but they must be able to:

converse confidently in english be able to test POC where applicable have a proven record of assisting the Joomla community

This volunteer role requires only a little commitmentment but does require a lot of discretion as you may be dealing with exploits that will affect the joomla community as a whole.

For those interested please complete the expression of interest  form  by the 15th May 
 

It is our privilege and pleasure to announce the immediate release of Joomla! 3.1. The biggest feature of Joomla 3.1 is Tags, a built-in tagging system chiefly engineered by Elin Waring and Mark Dexter. However, it’s not just any kind of tagging, it’s dynamic tagging across content-types.

For people wanting to blog about this week's release of Joomla 3.1, we have some marketing materials ready for you.

Here's the main image for Joomla 3.1. This image helps to show that the main feature of 3.1 is Tags.

Google’s Open Source offices have officially announced that there will be a Google Summer of Code Program this year. Because of the wild success of our projects with GSoC last year, the Joomla Community has again put together a team to mentor college / university students of any age for the summer. That team has already filled out the application for Google, and been approved by Google. This is happening, folks!

What’s on The Plate for This Year?

Last year had a major focus on the (then) Joomla Platform codebase. Six out of our seven projects were platform related. This year, we have almost the opposite so far in terms of project ideas. The CMS has quite a few more project ideas on our ideas list, which should mean great innovation and maybe some new features in the upcoming Joomla 3 releases. The CMS is an exciting place for people interested in working on innovative applications. New features like tagging and Bootstrap and new CMS only APIS have created a good infrastructure for new work and for extension developers to dig in and check out all the great new features available to them in the 3.0 series! Both being a student developer and mentoring will put you in the middle of exciting changes for 3.2, 3.5 and beyond.

Help Wanted

If you’re interested in helping with GSoC, mentoring a student, or you are a student, we’d love to hear from you. There are a few important ways that we need help this year. If you’re a programmer who just doesn’t have the time to take on mentoring a student and project (we’re all busy!) maybe you could just offer some assistance when a student has the need for some code to be tested by several different testers who can provide useful feedback.

If you are a programmer and you do have a bit of available time over the summer, we can always use more mentors. Even if you can’t commit to a full time mentoring position, just having someone available at the right time can make a difference. Just talk to us, we’ll find a way to work with your schedule and the time you have available. Of course, if you can commit to mentoring a project, we would love to hear from you too - don’t be shy!

Getting More Info

There’s a lot of information about GSoC out there, specific to Joomla and more general just for GSoC. Here’s a few links to help you out:

• GSoC
  • google-melenage
  • mentoring wiki
  • FAQ
• Joomla GSoC
  
  • 2012 Magazine Article
  • 2012 Students & Projects
  • Ideas page
  • Mentoring signup form (google)

To get in contact with the GSoC team, send an email to gsoc [at] opensourcematters.org

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Last week the opportunity to support women in tech was presented in a blog entitled Joomla & GNOME Partner Up for an Internship for Women.

On behalf of the Joomla project, the board of Open Source Matters, Inc., pledges to match, dollar for dollar, the total amount raised by community sponsors. If enough sponsors step up to fund $5700 to cover one internship, the project will fund a second internship.   As of today's date, $300 have been raised.   Let’s see what we can do together! We have until May 1 to take a stand with Joomla to encourage more women in computing!   Become a Sponsor! We are looking for community sponsors who could donate towards the internship fund since GNOME requires $5,000 stipend for each internship, as well as $500 travel allowance, and $200 administration fee. (The administrative fee will be used to cover intern payments transfer fees and to expand the resources of the GNOME Foundations needed for growing the program.) Our goal is to raise enough money for two internships.   Organizations that sponsor will be able to have their logo listed on the GNOME website and the Joomla landing page for this initiative.   To Donate: Please contact Sandra Ordonez, who serves on the Open Source Matters board, at sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org   To Apply:

1. Make sure to read up on the GNOME program: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
   
   
2. You must contribute code to GitHub as part of the application process.
    
3. Send your cover letter, resume, and link to any code to sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org

With the ever-increasing demand for content to be consumed across platforms and across devices, Joomla urgently needs a RESTful web services API.  It is no longer enough to just publish content on a website and expect people to use a web browser to access it.  Nowadays people want to consume content on smartphones, tablets and other devices, and they want to be able to connect information systems together to break out of the old content silos.  Joomla as a content management system (CMS) needs to be more open to new methods of publishing content and we need to think beyond the traditional web CMS to embrace the full extent of our mission "to provide a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration".

Supporting diversity is an important tenet for Joomla leadership to uphold. Not only does it improve the quality of work coming out of our project, but as leaders in the Open Source space, it is important that we lead by example. This is particularly true, considering the currently low numbers of women in Open Source, which according to a well-cited study by UCAM at the University of Cambridge, is only 2%

Let me repeat that again: 2% of individuals in Open Source are women. While it is true that the Joomla community seems to be an organic leader in this regard, in that our events and leadership teams are comprised of more than 2% women, we still have a lot of work to do in this area, particularly when it comes to coding. Like most other projects, the percentage of women coders is quite low.

As a result of these and other reasons, the Joomla project will be taking part in GNOME Outreach Program for Women. The program was inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code, and by how few women applied for it in the past. The program is also backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy, and has attracted the participation of many well known Open Source projects.

We are Looking for Sponsors!

We are also looking for community sponsors who could donate towards the internship fund since GNOME requires $5,000 stipend for each internship, as well as $500 travel allowance, and $200 administration fee. (The administrative fee will be used to cover intern payments transfer fees and to expand the resources of the GNOME Foundations needed for growing the program.) Our goal is to raise enough money for two internships.

 

Organizations that sponsor will be able to have their logo listed on the GNOME website and the Joomla landing page for this initiative.

 

To Donate:  

Please contact Sandra Ordonez, who serves on the Open Source Matters board, at sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org

To Apply:

1) Make sure to read up on the GNOME program: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen

2) You must contribute code to GitHub as part of the application process. https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen

3) Send your cover letter, resume, and link to any code to sandy.ordonez@opensourcematters.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Effective April 1, 2013 the Joomla Extensions Directory will drop the requirement for index.html files in all folders.

Why the change?

The rule is obsolete and has not been an effective ‘security' measure for a long time. You can read more about it here: http://www.dionysopoulos.me/blog/86-the-files-of-wrath.html

The #1 error with extensions submitted to be listed in the JED is SE1 (missing index.html files) which significantly slows down the approval process for everyone.  Once the error is flagged, the developer has to fix it and then we have to re-screen it. The whole process gets unnecessarily long.

Once we approve an extension for listing it’s generally not checked again, unless there’s an issue reported. It’s quite common for a developer to update his/her extension and miss a few index.html files which will go unnoticed anyway.

What is the alternative?

Check with your hosting providers to see if they have directory traversal disabled.

Utilize the .htaccess / web.config file to prevent directory traversal.   

http://docs.joomla.org/How_do_you_convert_an_htaccess.txt_file_into_a_.htaccess_file%3F

http://docs.joomla.org/Htaccess_examples_%28security%29

You can comment on this blog post here.

Joomla version 3.1.0 will be released on April 15. This will give us a little more time to test and fine-tune the exciting new tagging feature and also to fix some other unrelated issues.

Version 3.1.0_beta3 will be released on March 29. This will have the same feature set as the final 3.1.0 release. We encourage people to download and try the beta version and provide feedback.

The Tags component will be a great addition to Joomla. It addresses the tagging, labelling, and multi-category requests that have been made over the years. For example, “assign multiple categories to an article” is currently ranked #7 on the ideas.joomla.org site. Tags will address that by allowing you to create lists, blogs, or other layouts that combine articles and other content types any way you like.

An amazing number of people have been contributing to version 3.1, both with coding and testing. For example, over 50 people have helped test and fix bugs just in the past 90 days. If you want to get involved, please consider joining the Joomla Bug Squad.