Today I went to Utrecht where the Dutch Joomla!-days took place. I was quite surprized by the size of the event, it was three times as big as I expected, with 5 parallel sessions and a lot of international core-developers.

It was interesting in more than one way. During some of the presentation some bits of the release process were presented, basically they want to do a 4-6 month cycle, 2,5 months of development and 1,5 month of testing, documenting and releasing. Of course I could not resist in constantly comparing the stuff they do with how we do it within KDE. I’m interested in one particular part of their process. At the start of a new development cycle they request white papers. These describe the new features in detail for the next release. I know Ubuntu does something similar. I’m wondering if that could be something we could use within KDE as well.

It would be kind of cool to know in detail what the goals will be for the next release we make. Those white papers can also hold information about the way a feature will be implemented and can be the base for discussion with the relevant group of developers. Think about it, it would make sense I think.

One of the presentations was done by one of the american developers. The first ten seconds were kind of normal, after that he made us stand up and rearrange the room, so we would sit in big circles. He stood in the middle and we were allowed to shoot random questions to him on any subject we wanted. I think we could also do something like that within KDE. Sometimes I feel that we don’t always listen that good to hear the biggest problems our users have. Normally you could get that info due to bug reports, but since we get so many it is kind of hard to pick out the big line out of it. It would be a nice idea to have an IRC session for example, where we invite a couple of core KDE developers and where everyone can ask any random question they want about KDE. That way we also be more accessible to our users…

One of the new feature in Joomla! 1.6 will be ACL’s. Currently I find that one of the biggest shortcomings of Joomla!. There need to be more finegrained rights management. You want people belonging to groups, groups belonging to other groups. Then you want to allow or deny them to do certain actions. But you also want to restrict them to certain categories of content. So it’s kind of three dimensions you need to cope with. The implementation framework is not the biggest problem. phpGACL provides it. The problem they face is how to implement it in a clean way in the user interface and keeping the performance.

I’ve seen a couple of presentations, which I found interesting and learned a lot more about making templates in Joomla!, how their community work and how open they are to their users. Anyhow, I had an interesting day there.