Multi-lingual content manager for Joomla! - Nooku

The beginning of every new year gives pause for both retrospective and prospective thought. We celebrate the new year as we take a look back at the year that was and get a glimpse of the year that will be.

Looking back at the year that was

Creativity, Innovation and Inspiration – three words I will remember best from 2011. The platitude “hard work pays off” rang true this past year with the great work done in our little project.  Nooku development literally moved ahead at warp-speed in 2011.

Growing the Nooku Platform

• Nooku Framework grew to an awesome RESTful framework for web development and especially for rapid development of powerful custom Joomla solutions.
• Nooku Server. We saw the birth of Nooku Server, a multi-site web application platform. Based on lightened core of Joomla 1.5 and optimised for performance and scalability.
• Nooku Components. Lot’s of innovation happened with the development of new re-usable components: com_files, com_activities, com_debug, com_groups, …

A year in a few numbers

Three years ago, we were not much more then a handful of people with a vision. Today, Nooku is:

• 29 contributors from all over the world, of which 21 contributed in 2011
• 20 partners from enterprises, governmental organisations, and non-profits
• 475 subscribers in the developer’s discussion group
• hundreds of websites powered by the Nooku Platform

Nooku was present and accounted for during many events throughout the year:

• We attended/sponsored and presented Nooku on the Dutch Joomladays and Joomladay Sydney, we partied and won awards at Jandbeyond.
• Switzerland, Sweden, Brazil, Germany, Philippines, Belgium witnessed Nooku magic. 6 Nooku Jams in 3 continents together with our community!

Code metrics are not a good measurement for the size or quality of a project, but they do help to indicate progress. In our official repositories, we have:

• 4400 commits for Nooku Framework
• 1400 commits for Nooku Components
• 400 commits for Nooku Examples
• 3300 commits for Nooku Server

Looking forward to the year ahead

Nooku is not a product, it’s a project. We think different, we work different and in 2012 we are also going to release different.

Nooku is a never-ending river of change. The alpha/beta/stable nomenclature expects an end point of changes that is captured in final form called “stable”. Then, the cycle renews itself into the next stable version. This cycle doesn’t fit with our Nooku manifesto.

Nooku is about change. The projects mission is to manage that change; not release a product. And that’s what 2012 will be all about !

No more alpha’s, just releases

In 2012 we will introduce 4 month release cycles. First release will happen 30th of January, and will be numbered 12.1 (year.release number). Second release of 2012 will be 12.2, and so forth.

The flow of a release will look like this :

• 0 months : Start release in development branch
• 4 months : Merge release into trunk
• 8 months : Tag release

Total cycle for a release will be 8 months. Work in trunk and development is done at the same time so there will be a release every 4 months. Developers can contribute at any point during those 8 months :

• (0 – 4m) development  : new features, API changes etc
• (4 – 8m) stabilization  : bug fixes, documentation etc.

No backwards compatibility

There will be no backwards compatibility between releases. The changes between versions will be documented. Each version will have a development cycle of 4 months and a stabilization cycle of 4 months.

Developers releasing public/commercial Joomla components on Nooku Framework MUST update every 4 months. The 4 month stabilization cycle ensures developers have enough time to do so.

Upcoming Nooku Jams

We will continue building the Nooku community with three project organised Nooku Jams a year, one at the end/beginning of a release cycle.

In 2012 we will organise 2 Nooku Jams in Leuven Belgium at FlandersDC. The first Jam will be somewhere in May, more details will be announced early February.

A happy Nooku Year !

In 2012 we will continue to do what we do best : making change happen ! I wish everyone a creative, innovative and inspiring Nooku year!