All Together, As A Whole Proudly Introduces Molajo™ and jZenGarden

The goal of All Together, As A Whole (ATAAW) is to engage and empower the Joomla!® community of developers and site builders in order to increase our shared resources and strengthen our ecosystem. ATAAW is a network of nearly 1,000 Joomla! professionals. In its first year, ATAAW has accomplished a great deal, including contributing to such projects as the Joomla! Community Magazine, Joomla! Forward, J and Beyond, JoomStew Radio, and the ATAAW Movies.

ATAAW is very proud to introduce two new initiatives: Molajo™ and jZenGarden.

Molajo means from Joomla!­ - it is a name created from the letters of the Joomla! name. In much the same manner, Molajo is a distribution created from the powerful and flexible Joomla! 1.6 application framework. In the future, it is anticipated many Molajo distributions will be shared, each crafted for different vertical markets.

The first Molajo Joomla! 1.6 distribution includes the following features:
  • Usability improvements, including ACL simplifications;
  • JAdminTools, a single-click administrative solutions, such as permissions modification and database maintenance and backup;
  • Construct, a frontend Template framework;
  • Minima, an Administrator Template;
  • Comments, ratings, social bookmarking, activity logs for Joomla! 1.6 Components;
  • Sample extensions for Joomla developers.
A development road map details these, and other, plans. All code used in Molajo will be
available for consideration for inclusion in the official Joomla! releases.

jZenGarden will showcase a collection of Joomla! 1.6 Templates offered under the GPL and at no charge to Joomla! users. The site will allow contributing designers to share profiles highlighting services and other offerings to site visitors. Each Molajo distribution will include an extension that helps users review, select, and install jZenGarden Templates within the Joomla! 1.6 Administrator. This extension will also be shared on the Joomla! Extension Directory for use with any Joomla! 1.6 Web site.

jZenGarden Templates will:
  • Use common sample data and template module positions;
  • Install with a standard Joomla! 1.6 installer;
  • Be licensed under the GPL;
  • Be available free of charge.

Contributors and Leadership

In order to be successful, these efforts require strong community involvement and clearly defined structure. The ATAAW administrators will help with overall coordination. Each team will be guided by a team leader and staffed with skilled members who are willing to devote time to the effort. Others interested in participating are invited to contact a team lead and volunteer.

The role of the team leader is to act as coordinators for the various initiatives by ensuring the team meets on a regular basis, that there is good communication on plans and accomplishments, and that resources are available to help each member be successful in their role. Together, the various team leaders communicate on inter-team needs in order to provide for the overall project success.

Current ATAAW Administrators are:

Communications Team

Needless to say, this effort will require excellent communication. Our email lists, meetings, schedule, and code are open. Individual contributors are encouraged to share information about their work and what their teams are doing. The overall message will be coordinated by the Communications Team to ensure accurate and timely information is shared within the team and with interested parties.

Members include: Links:

Molajo Joomla! 1.6 Distribution

Website
People Group
Molajo is a Joomla! 1.6 distribution. It is planned that additional Molajo distributions will be shared in the future, each focused on different vertical markets and community need. The Molajo code is open and located at the All Together, As A Whole Assembla site. Developers interested in contributing code are invited to join.

A key benefit of community-based distributions is the ability to explore solutions to problems without taking undue risk with the core distribution. We believe distributions will help community developers collaborate on ideas, share the code with the project, and enable the project to introduce proven solutions in future releases.

Usability Team

The Minima Administrator Template included in the Molajo distribution serves as a huge step forward in overall usability and user experience. The Usability Team’s job is to identify additional changes needed to the Administration area in order to increase acceptance of Joomla!. Much of what is discovered by this team will drive development efforts for the Molajo distribution and could also be shared with the Joomla! 1.7 UI/UX project.

Members include:

Development Team

For the Molajo Distribution, the goal is to augment what is available in Joomla! 1.6. In some cases, the development team might find core changes are ideal. If that is the case, a patch will be shared with the Joomla! project. If that patch is not accepted, the team will work to avoid core hacks by first looking to Extensions, then core class overrides, and finally, the possible inclusion of methods in a Molajo Library. The philosophy is to share code back with the project. The hope is to avoid core hacks.

Members include:

Packaging and Distribution Team

Molajo Web site Development

Molajo User Support

jZenGarden

Website
People Group

jZen Web Site Development

Design and build the jZenGarden Web site, including the development of Extensions needed to display and install Designer Templates and display Designer profiles.

jZen Web Site Administration

Define the parameters for involving designers and their submissions to jZenGarden and consider the overall administration of the site.

Elders Council

The purpose of the Elders Council is to be available for guidance and support to the various initiatives and to be available to respond to community questions and concerns. It is important to note that the Elders Council is not a leadership team, but rather an advisory resource comprised of people with long term experience in the Joomla! project, the wider Free Software Movement and the respect of the community.

Views: 78

Tags: Molajo™, jZenGarden

Comment by Manoel J. Silva on October 20, 2010 at 5:01pm
Congratulations and Thank You!
Comment by Oleg Nesterov on October 21, 2010 at 1:26am
WOW, that's exciting!
Comment by Martin Blodau on October 21, 2010 at 1:45am
Simply amazing. Thanks to everyone involved for doing this!
Comment by Parth Lawate on October 21, 2010 at 6:19am
Wow ! You guys do work fast !
Comment by Michel van Agtmaal on October 21, 2010 at 9:36am
This Team Rocks!
Comment by Leo Lammerink on October 21, 2010 at 9:59am
Exactly this announcement made me return to ATAAW....something for real is created here
Comment by Amy Stephen on October 21, 2010 at 10:01am
Excellent article by Steve Burge at Alledia The Pros and Cons of Distributions.
Comment by Danny Englander (highrockmedia) on October 21, 2010 at 11:38am
Congrats this sounds great. I am just curious and this is a theoretical: Once Joomla 1.6 gets released and there are dot updates, say for example Joomla 1.6.1, will it be fairly straight forward to update Molajo to the same core 1.6.1 version? (This would be akin to my updating an Acquia Drupal site with a security update but the core of Drupal is actually the same and does not deviate from an actual Drupal dot update)
Comment by Horus68 on October 21, 2010 at 12:30pm
My best wishes for the new project.
The big questions:
1- What are the plans to be able to move a site from 1.6 Joomla to Molajo or from Molajo to Joomla 1.6?
2- And to migrate a site from 1.5 to Molajo?
3- Does extensions that will be created to Molajo (to solve issues on Core) needs to be compatible with Joomla 1.6 sites or just with the Molajo+Nooku?

You could reply that the core code on Joomla/Molajo sites will be all similar... but I don't think it would be possible at all, as different teams would evolve in different directions (not a bad option in strict sense), but a concern for those that will install any of those solutions, specially with different frameworks.

PS: I like the elders council, an idea generically similar to what I also suggested to Joomla as I consider that any project really needs it!
Comment by Amy Stephen on October 21, 2010 at 1:12pm
Dan -

Yes, our plan is to use the 1.6 upgrade process to point to our XML and update. So, updating a Molajo site will include the updates to the Joomla! core, along with changes we might make to additional software.

There might be updates required to the response extensions I am creating (comments, etc.) - or to the Minima Template Marco is working on - and not the Joomla! 1.6 core. To the user, though, the updates will be the same one click update.

That's part of the benefit of a distro. Right now, we are able to do a reasonably good job at getting core security patches out - but are not able to do the same with the plethora of extensions one might need. This way, we will at least be able to extend the ability to keep the additional extensions updated.

Horus -

1. Molajo will be Joomla! 1.6 at it's base. It will have the same table structure -and the same core code. So, don't think of it as a different code base, it's the same Joomla! 1.6 application architecture.

The Extensions we are including would also be shared on JED as normal extensions, if someone wants to add those separately it should be no problem.

2. Migrating a site from 1.5 to Molajo will be no different than migrating from 1.5 to 1.6. (Remember, it's just 1.6 underneath.) It would rock to work Matias on including his migration utility to smooth that out nicely. Maybe we can do that.

3. Construct Template Framework (frontend), Minima Adminstrator Tools, Admin Tools, and a set of Response Extensions (i.e., comments, ratings, social bookmarks, subscriptions, and activity logs), will be included. (Maybe a couple more but still talking - we will announce if finalized.)

Yes, it will be fully compatible with any 1.6 install.

4. (Going to add a #4 even though it's not in your list- to address your nooku misconceptions.) This first Molajo distribution will not include nooku, although we are hoping to work with nooku in the future.

We are using nook on the jZenGarden site and are eager to compare and contrast nooku with 1.6 framework. We believe it would be unwise to ignore nooku and we want to understand first hand what it offers Joomla! developers. In my "Amy dreamworld" - this community pulls together and starts to identify the best of the best for inclusion in core - CLEARLY nooku is something deserving of our attention.

But in direct response to your question, the first distribution of Molajo will *not* include Nooku. We are working with Joomla! 1.6, as it is, and augmenting it's offerings.

5. (And now a number 5 for your code question) I won't argue that the core code will be similar. I'm claiming outright it is. We have not made any core hacks and we hope to avoid it. There are ways to deal with desired changes that can be used by skilled developers that allow you to avoid hacking core. If we do have to hack core, we'll do so in a way that is easy to uninstall. BUT, we have not yet found the need to do so and we plan to avoid it if humanly possible.

6. I love the elder's council too. There are likely people on our council that the Joomla! project in it's current state might not accept. When you look at our elder's council - I hope you see very wise people who have not always looked at Joomla! the same way. These people can help us pull our community back together and I value each of their input, very very much. I also value yours, Horus, and I thank you for your commitment to Joomla! and your thought provoking questions.

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