Joomla is not just my CMS of choice, but is also developed and maintained by its community. That also means, that Joomla depends on the contributions of the community. I have been contributing to Joomla since 2005 and claim for myself to have left quite a big impact on this project. Here I want to show a little bit of the work that I have done over the years.
I started out with a few bug fixes to Joomla 1.0 in 2005, just to run into the deficient access control system. That led to me learning of phpGACL and how it could have been implemented in Joomla, which resulted in my participation of the Google Summer of Code in the summer of 2006 to work on that topic. At the same time, I also started contributing to the Joomla 1.5 development. My main contributions here was the conversion of the core components to the new MVC format and a lot of bug fixing.
With the release of Joomla 1.5.0, I participated in the discussions about Joomla 1.6 and later was asked if I wanted to be part of the lead-.team around this release together with Ercan Özkaya and Klas Berlic. In the following months we three worked together on Joomla 1.6 and implemented a lot of the things that are the foundation of Joomla still today. My work encompassed the nested categories, routing, the extended MVC classes (JModelAdmin, JModelItem, JControllerItem, etc.), the changed parameter format and the new format for the language files, as well as lots of small changes.
Between Joomla 1.7 and 2.5, I mainly contributed bugfixes. During the 3.x releases I again worked more on specific features, with special regard to the routing in Joomla. For this I also did a crowdfunding campaign in 20014. An important fix from me for a major bug in the password management was accepted for Joomla 3.2.1 and which made the encryption of passwords in Joomla future-proof. Since Joomla 3.3, a lot of improvements to the routing from me have been accepted.
For some time now I have been helping out with the development of Joomla 4.0. Again, a lot of work went into the URL routing, as well as in a refactoring of JForm. My main focus right now is an improvement of the built-in search functionality.
As you can see, several thousand hours from me went into the development of this project and I would love to continure supporting and contributing to the best free CMS in the world. See how you can support me in that here.