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Does Joomla have a vision?

Tuesday, 08 March 2011 23:14

Joomla has released version 1.6 just about two months ago and its a version with major changes. It was a big effort to develop all of this and make it stable and everyone deserves a little bit of time off after this. However, with the release of Joomla 1.6 the project also announced that from now on, a new major release should be made every six months. So instead of a feature based release Joomla has moved to a timeboxed release. While that might seem like a good idea to spur more interest from developers and a way to speed up development, it also requires more management. Ideally, you would have to decide even before releasing the current version, what the features for the next version should be, so that people have time to develop those features and that you have at least a two months period for testing and stabilising.

But before you can talk about specific features, you should have a general vision for a project. Similar to a constitution, a project vision gives the general direction that features should aim for and helps building consensus about to be invested work.

From my point of view, Joomla is lacking that global vision at the moment. Maybe I'm wrong and that vision just hasn't been publicised. Or its worse and the vision is to just follow behind other CMS projects.

So when an active vision is needed, what should that vision be? Joomla has always benefitted from two elements: The perceived low entry barrier to a grown-up CMS and the huge number of extensions available. On the other hand the quality of most of the extensions is not very high and after the initial jump into the pool, people often run into a wall, especially since the release of 1.6.

Now we could be talking about being standards compliant and always on the bleeding edge in terms of new technology, but I'd like to settle for something else. For me there are three goals for Joomla:

1. Be simple
   This means that user interfaces should come to you naturally and that they provide the features that you basically expect. It also means that you are not drowned in features. Less is more!
2. Have quality extensions
   Good quality extensions are secure and easy to use extensions. Such extensions attract users and in the end provide profitable business for everybody. But good quality extensions are not only a responsibility of the third-party developer (Which is actually a term that we should not use. We are a community and not third parties.) but also of the core project. Joomla is written as a framework which means that it should take over all those boring standard tasks for you, so that the developers can concentrate on creating additional value and provide innovation. Joomla lacks in that regard a lot currently.
3. Be consistent and "academically" correct
   A consistent code base makes it possible to easier fix bugs or change functionality system wide. An "academically" correct implementation means a proper abstraction and proper seperation between functionality.

With these three simple rules Joomla development would get a direction and provide volunteer developers a purpose. But especially for users it would be clear what they can expect from the program and the project.

Now the question is, if the Joomla leadership will try to find a vision for the project.