As readers of this blog, the development mailing lists and the work group forums know, in recent weeks we've been collecting feed back on having some paid development. We asked people to reflect on the impact on them personally and collected both survey type information and open ended responses. Thank you so much to the 70 people who responded for taking the time to share your thoughts and for the really thoughtful and heartfelt responses.

The form closed a little while ago, and we know people are curious, so we wanted to share the results right away. The qualitative results are here.

I'll just share some simple descriptive statistics below. Of course it will be extremely interesting to see how different subgroups differ, but these results are extremely interesting.  Later there will be more posts that summarize overall findings and patterns.

As you know, this past fall OSM started to pay Louis and Andrew for a day or two of their time per week working on Joomla! Development. This was done as an experiment, and now is the time at which we will begin evaluation of the results. The most important question is: what is the impact of this on our community of contributors, which is to say the people who are contributing to the Joomla! project.  We are also interested in the thoughts of the wider world of engaged users and Joomla! business people who may not contribute directly, but do have a stake in the continued success of the Joomla! Project.  We invite everyone to participate in this process by filling out this form.   We'll collect responses until 11:55pm UTC on January 31 2010.

We want to emphasize that this form focuses on the actual impact on people and firms, not on philosophical discussions or speculation about the impact on other people.

Of course a form like this is not in any way a vote or a popularity contest, nor is it scientific. It is simply one of a number of ways of collecting information from people with a variety of experiences and backgrounds. We'll be sharing the results of this and other analyses in February.

Thanks for your help with this.

Shortly before christmas 2009 Ole wrote a blog asking the community for your input related the new OSM board members which the CoC needs to elect in February 2010. With the call "Community input needed - choosing new OSM board members" we started something new. Non of us in the CoC know what we will get as response or input. With more than 100 votes and 19 comments it is one of those blogs that got quite some attention. Some of the regional communities even posted a translation of the blog on their sites.

What is really positive is that in the 20 days from December, 22nd to January 12th we got 56 nominations. There are quite a number of old fellows and friends on this list but there are also some new names. Some people that nominated are from regional communities and normally not involved in our centralized website. I personally think this experiment was successful and we got a really positive feedback. Thank you all that have participated in the nomination, thank's to all the candidates showing interest and many thank's to everybody who helped sharing this effort with your regional communities.

Now you will ask what is next? The next step is a simple chat within the CoC. We will discuss the various nominations and might do a follow up with some of the candidates. We are interested to know those we suggest if we do not know them yet. Of course we will discuss our suggestions with the other teams of the project and get their opinion as well. In the end the CoC will elect the new board members for OSM. We plan the election before February, 15th in order to give OSM the new board members before their next meeting. So all these steps will be done in the next few days and weeks. And of course we will keep you posted about the decisions made.

For the moment I like to thank again the whole community of Joomla for this great combined effort and thank you for your understanding, that we now stick our heads together and might be a bit silent for the next few days. You gave us quite some homework to be done ;-).

Do you remember the GSOC project JConnect on Joomla?. This multi-integration engine started out by connecting Joomla! with Elgg. If you are new to the project or forgot about it, see this page. Due to conflicting brand names, JConnect is now JConnekt; read the full story on the blog.

JConnekt Begins

The project is as active as ever, and all the latest downloads and updates can be found at the newly established website, jconnekt.org.

Some of the changes in JConnekt's codebase compared to 'JConnect' as you used to know it are:

• Communication library replaced with a home cooked on for  improving  effiecient communication.
• A unique feature called Auto Active Single Sign On. (Google do this for sub domains ; But we do this for cross domains too)
• Wordpress integration is well underway and soon to be announced.

JC Needs You

JConnekt is still in its infancy as both project and product. Any help with quality assurance will be most appreciated. Track issues, write usability reports, explain in full what features you need for your site. Simply put, JConnect, in the spirit of FOSS, needs a community.

Website : http://www.jconnekt.org

Ideally, by now everyone interested should start frequenting the new site, and rely on it to deliver all the latest JC news. To aid in the transition however there will be a couple more posts following this one, here at the Joomla Community Blogs, so stay tuned!

The Vulnerable Extension List team would like to announce the availability of the RSS feed for the vulnerable extension list.

To enable this feed, either place the dedicated url
http://feeds.joomla.org/JoomlaSecurityVulnerableExtensions

Here are two examples of how to use the feed.
When placed in a news feed module  on your website front end to produce a list like this



If you wish to place it in the administrator cpanel position then it will display in the following format.

Clicking a title within the Feed will take you to the current months alerts

The feed will be changed per month to highlight the latest items. If you wish to comment, or have any questions then please see this topic within the security forum for instructions on adding the feed

Thank you

Updated February 2010