Recently there was a highly visible change at joomla.org as we relaunched our forums on phpBB3 . Along with the changes to our sites, we also have a few changes inside the Joomla! project to announce. Please join us in recognising and honouring the work of three core team members who have recently stepped down from the team and in welcoming a new member.

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  Tonie de Wilde has been the wizard behind the curtain for many of our sites and infrastructure projects since he joined the team. Tonie announced his resignation a while ago via a post on our team blogs, but we want to acknowledge his work and efforts and thank him for everything that he has done. He continues to contribute to the community as a global moderator on the forums.

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  Robin Muilwijk has been an ever-present and positive force most recently as development working group coordinator along with Wilco Jansen. Without his help we certainly would not be where we are, and he will be sorely missed.  Robin will remain as a forum global moderator and will continue to help us all as he has time.

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  Andy Miller has been the guiding light of design for the Joomla! project since its beginning. Everything from our website templates to the administrator user interface to anything else that needed to look good has had the great benefit of Andy's touch. Joomla! most certainly would not be what it is today without his vision, his talent and his devotion.

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  Last, but certainly not least, also join us in welcoming an old friend back to the core team.  Andrew Eddie was the project leader during the birth of the Joomla! project. After a time away from the core team, he has rejoined to help Joomla! into the future. Andrew will be joining Wilco as Development Working Group Coordinator and taking over where Robin left off.

Over the last few months we have talked a lot with the phpBB crew as well as attended events together and have been continually impressed with their team and their software.  With phpBB we have a cutting edge forum platform that is truly free and open source so that any modifications we make to improve the software can be easily given back to the entire phpBB community. The transition was a huge effort and we would like to thank the phpBB team, especially Josh, for helping in data migration as well as many other technical questions along the way. A special thanks goes out to our own Brad Baker who led this amazing effort.  As with any change there will be hiccups along the way, but the transition has been very smooth. We look forward to a very bright future for our new forums.

The Joomla! community congratulates the Drupal community on their release of Drupal 6.0.  It is a great accomplishment and shows the strength and creativity of their free and open source community. Their hard work has paid off and again shown the power of open source collaboration to produce great software. We are especially thrilled for the many Drupal community members who we have gotten to know, most recently when both projects participated in the Google GHOP Contest .

Drupal like Joomla! makes it possible for millions of people to be creators of rich and complex web content without having to be coders. We celebrate Drupal's achievement in this, just as we celebrated our release of Joomla! 1.5.

Well done Drupal, and congratulations.

 Following the release of Joomla! 1.0.14 [daybreak] and Joomla! 1.5.1 [seenu] we are entering the planning phase for the next minor release of Joomla!: version 1.6. With the release, we have two goals: better planning and more involvement with the community. 

We will be determining the goals of the release with a planning process that means that we will determine what we are going to implement before we actually start developing. The focus on community involvement will mean that everyone can give input on the features that might get into the next minor release of Joomla!

So what is the plan?

We are starting our work on Joomla! 1.6 by formally setting the goals for the release. To work out what those goals are going to be we are going to consult with the community.

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest for pre-university students (high school and secondary school students) aimed at encouraging young people to participate in open source projects. Joomla! is proud to have been invited to join with nine other open source organisations for this pilot program. Tomasz Dobrzyński was unanimously selected as Joomla!'s 2008 Grand Prize Winner of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Tomasz completed seven tasks during the competition.

1. Translate part of the Installation Manual to a non-English Language - output - forum thread
2. Create a Blog Entry Date Calendar Icon Plugin for Joomla! v 1.5 - output - forum thread
3. Create a Joomla! v 1.5 Plugin to update Twitter status with article title when published - output - forum thread
4. Carry out GHOP unit test on the Joomla1 1.5 Test Package for the Front Page Manager - output - forum thread
5. Carry out GHOP unit test on the Joomla1 1.5 Test Package: Template Manager - output - forum thread
6. Carry out GHOP unit test on the Joomla1 1.5 Test Package: Menu Manager - output - forum thread
7. Implement Avatar/Gravatars for Joomla! v 1.5 - output - forum thread

Selecting a winner was difficult because there were many deserving contestants. In review, it was obvious that GHOP was more than a contest for Tomasz. He demonstrated what contributing to a free software community should be like. He discovered that learning is fun, he expressed joy in sharing what he produced with others, he was proud to contribute his gifts, and he was honoured to be a part of the Joomla! community. As is true with many other contestants, Tomasz inspired those of us who worked with the program and reminded us why we also contribute.

We congratulate Tomasz Dobrzyński on this well deserved honor and we thank him, and each of the others, who contributed to the Joomla! community.

All completed contest tasks are available for review and download.

See also:

• Google blog post announcing the Grand Prize Winners
• Google Official Contest website
• About the Joomla! GHOP students
• Contest announcement on www.joomla.org
• Joomla! contest pages on code.google.com
• Joomla! contest discussion forum
• Official Joomla! blog posts about the contest