Soapbox Engage Blog

As the sun sets on most of the bug squashing locations this afternoon, we in San Francisco are also winding down on what has been a tremendous community effort. In less than 48 hours, developers and testers around the globe have squashed more Joomla 1.5 bugs than we ever could have imagined.

What some thought would normally take 4 weeks was completed in just two days.

In San Francisco, we had a blast. Today brought us two additional community members, including Steve Reichgut (all the way from Tracy) and Ron Severdia. Their efforts brought our daily total of seven SF community members doing their best to help get 1.5 out the door. Helped by a good dosage of snacks provided graciously by Debbie, freshly brewed coffee, and a nice view of the SF bay from the PICnet SF corner window, developers went to town slaying the bugs.

It's been a whirlwind on our first day of Joomla Pizza, Bugs, and Fun here. We've got three US cities connected, including San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York all bringing their best to join the Joomla fun. I had the joy of flying cross-country last night, and now am blogging for you live from the PICnet SF office where we're hosting 6 of us Joomla bug crunchers.The day started off very smoothly, with DC and NY going online at 10am. Cold weather ain't stopping us! We setup an IRC room for the main chat, and a secondary Skype chat room for us IRC delinquents. After realizing that we had the power to kick out the jams, we figured out that we needed to have a plan of attack for squashing these suckers effectively.

Wilco stepped up to the mic and called from the NY location to the DC location, and gave us some marching orders. In general, our goal was to make sure that we weren't duplicating efforts on the patches. So, we created a Google doc, which allowed people to post which bug artifact they were working on, and then notify Wilco of the start of their work.

So far, things have gone much more smoothly than I had ever imagined. Big thanks to the likes of Wilco, Elin, Rob, Kenneth, and Louis for their long travels to be on the scene to give guidance to the community as we patch away. Even bigger props to the 39 community members around the world that have taken time from their Saturdays to make this a reality. And finally, to my fellow PICnetters, thank you for the donation of your time to make sure we're rocking smoothly here.

More updates coming throughout the day! Photos after the jump.

Many of our organizations are using Non-Profit Soapbox for their CMS, and when doing so also elect to utilize Google Apps for their email services. This means they receive two great tools: a content management system and an email administration system. Unfortunately, it also means that they have to utilize two different systems to manage these functionalities.

What if we could bridge that gap? What if we could provide an administrative control panel for Google Apps within the Joomla administrator?

After a point in the right direction by a good friend, it seems like this could become a reality. Google provides rather detailed PHP API for their provisioning system, including even an API for the Zend Google Data Client Library to access the Provisioning API functionality.

Using the API, one could build remote functionalities such as:

• managing user accounts
• managing nicknames
• creating email lists

Anyone built on top of this yet?

The Joomla! core team has done an amazing amount of work over the past 2 years to bring Joomla! 1.5 to life. This group of dedicated developers have given large portions of their daily lives to make Joomla! a powerful tool to empower millions of individuals around the world.

On this Thanksgiving Day, there's no better time for the Joomla! community to show our thanks and give back.

Last week I wrote a blog posting about how the community can help get Joomla 1.5 out the door. Now just a week later, we've got a plan of action. On the weekend of December 8 and 9, the US Joomla! community will have an opportunity to come together in New York, Washington, and California for the first ever Pizza, Bugs, and Fun (PBF) bug squashing event!

I get a ton of email. I truly believe that there are small gremlins in my laptop, building hundreds of emails a day for me to try to keep up with. Everyday, I lose the battle against email, and find myself flagging many of them for follow-up. This isn't too helpful though, because:

1. they're not actionable (there's no task associated with them)
2. it increases my blood pressure to see my follow-up email count rise to the current 424 level

In the rest of my Outlook life (that's right, I use Outlook 2003) I have created a task management system that allows me to create actionable items in my Task manager by categorizing everything I do into Musts, Needs, and Wants. This has actually worked pretty well, and has kept our Post-It note supply noticeably higher. Flagged emails, however, just make me look at the mess that is my inbox and realize this is a losing battle.

Until now.