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Ladies and gentleman, this is Mambo 5
As we tweeted a few days ago we are preparing a major announcement.
Nooku HQ is buzzing with activity. We are super excited about our announcement for#jd11nl. Changing everything, again !#innovation #joomla (source)
Unfortunately the news got leaked today on the website of the Joomladay.de, by an unnamed source, forcing us to announce earlier then planned. We are forking Joomla, creating a new CMS called Mambo 5 (codename: Lou Bega)
The fork is a joint effort between the German Joomla and Nooku communities and the Mambo Foundation. We have been collaborating due-diligently since the beginning of 2011.
Mambo 5 is a dream of group of passionate open source professionals, developers and hackers. We’re building our dream, for us and for you!
Jamming in Lugano with Nooku
On Wednesday, 19 January 2011, Joomla integrators and PHP developers gathered at the University of Lugano, CH for the first Swiss Nooku Jam. The Jam took place during the annual Beyounic Camp, a strategic workshop hosted by our friends from Beyounic.
Beyounic is the team behind Ohanah, a social event management platform built on Nooku Framework. They have become great friends in the past year and we (Tom and myself) were very excited to travel to Lugano to see their new office and organize a Nooku Jam together.
Geeks, students and teachers
Despite the exam period, we got a room full of interested informatics students, teachers and many other great people coming also from abroad. (@andreatorre came over all the way from Rome, Italy @luscarpa joined us from Venice, Italy)
With so many really talented people in the room, we were able to touch some very technical topics. Design patterns, use of web 3.0/semantic technologies, security, etc. Feedback during and after the event was great. The Jam was well appreciated by the faculty program manager and the participants.
First Nooku Developer Group
The afternoon after the event, a group of students got really interested in learning more about the Nooku Framework. For us this means the first seed for a swiss Nooku developer group has been successfully planted!
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Nooku Server loses 40% weight
Last December we announced our plans for Nooku Server, a multi-site and multi-lingual distribution of Joomla 1.5. With the help of our community we created a diet for Nooku Server and defined a roadmap.
For the first alpha we are focusing on implementing the key ingredients of our diet. Most of the work involves removing legacy code, legacy libraries and doing clean-up. In the past weeks we have been making steady progress.
- Core extensions: All the components, plugins and templates that didn’t made it into our list have been removed
- XML-RPC: XML-RPC support has been removed
- PDF: PDF support has been removed
- Legacy: Legacy support for Joomla 1.0 and PHP4 has been removed
- Security: All assets (css,js,images) have been moved to the media folder
- Libraries: Legacy libraries have been removed
- Performance: Hit support in Content and Weblinks has been removed
- Mootools: Mootools has been upgraded to 1.2 including the compatibility layer
- Framework: Nooku Framework has been added
With most of the refactoring completed it’s time to weigh the result. I have done a code count today to compare the code bases of Joomla 1.0, 1.5, 1.6 and Nooku Server. I used Ohcount, a little command line tool that is also used by Ohloh to do code counting.
We have made Nooku Server a whooping 40% lighter in code size. Yes, you read that right, we removed 40% code and we added a whole new framework at the same time.
Here are the detailed results:
A roadmap for Nooku Server
With Nooku Server’s diet established, we now have a good idea of the work that needs to be done. A next step in the process is to define a little roadmap.
Over the next 4 months, we are going to be rolling out alpha releases implementing the key ingredients as defined in our little diet and at the same time adding key features.
We will be working towards releasing an alpha about once every four weeks. This gives the following roadmap :
- Alpha 1 : February
- Alpha 2 : March
- Alpha 3 : April
Under ideal conditions Nooku Server would go beta in May 2011, right in time for JAB11.
Our development flow will be focused on maintaining the stability of the Joomla 1.5 core. Scope for the alpha releases will be kept very limited in order to avoid scope creep. For each alpha we will focus on one major feature or task.
Creating a diet for Nooku Server
A little over a month ago we announced our plans for Nooku Server, a multi-site Joomla 1.5 distribution. Before starting to integrate new features in Nooku Server we are giving the Joomla core a thorough code, features and performance review.
Joomla 1.5 core feature survey. To get a better idea of the features used, or more importantly not used in Joomla 1.5, we did a little survey with very interesting results. Almost 250 people filled it out, big thanks to all of you who did!
Results
1. Which Joomla core features do you use ?
You can find the result here. If we would apply the 80/20 rule the only feature that you really need and use is ‘Content’. All the rest of the core features is used less then 80%. If we turn the 80/20 rule around and we check which features are used at least by 20% of you, we get the following list:
- 82% – Content
- 68% – Search
- 46% – Contacts
- 34% – TinyMCE
- 32% – PDF rendering
- 29% – XML-RPC support
- 28% – Newsfeeds
- 22% – Banners
Still an interesting list. You are not using LDAP, Gmail or the XStandard editor at all. You also don’t use any of the core site templates, nor do you require build in help.
2. What is the number one feature you are missing in the Joomla core ?
You can find the result here. If we look at the features you are missing most we get the following top 3:
- 20% – Multi-site
- 18% – Improved permissions
- 13% – Multi-lingual support
The most interesting is that improved permissions, which is the major new feature for Joomla 1.6, is not the most needed feature. Instead most of you are looking for multi-site support.
Based on the results of both questions we can conclude that what you really need is not a CMS but instead you are looking for a flexible, customisable, multi-site and multi-lingual web application platform. And that’s exactly what we are going to build!
Nooku Jam Lugano
Together with our friends from Beyounic we are organising the first Nooku Jam of 2011 in beautiful city of Lugano, Switzerland on the 19th of January 2011. The University of Lugano has kindly offered to host the jam on their campus.
Nooku Framework is considered by many as one of the most interesting developments in the Joomlasphere of the last two years. Not only because of the spectacular code reduction (up to 80%), but also for the many features that were previously unavailable to Joomla and PHP developers:
- Near-zero-code HMVC
- REST architecture
- Object Relational Mapping
- Out of the box security features
- Extensibility through CoC, DI, Mixins …
- Extreme re-usability
If you are a Joomla or PHP developer looking to learn how to build better Joomla extensions faster you don’t want to miss this. Thanks to our sponsors the event is completely free. Don’t wait and register now!
Happy Nooku Year !
This is my first blog post of 2011, so first things first: happy N(ew)ooku Year to all of you! The beginning of a new year is an ideal moment to reflect on the past and also look forward to the future.
The year of you
2010 was the year of the Nooku Community, we’ve build some great new resources to help you collaborate, discuss and build Nooku-powered extensions :
- The Nooku Developer Portal. We launched our new developer portal . The place to go for developers: you can find our code, bug trackers and activity streams.
- The Nooku Mailing List. We made the mailing list public, as well the community-maintained wiki. The place to go to ask questions or find information on how to get started with Nooku.
Growing an open community
We adopted the GPLv3, LGPLv3 and AGPLv3 license and announced our Nooku Contributor Agreement. Both changes are forming the cornerstones on which we are growing Nooku as a truly open community of co-developers.
They also herald our ongoing commitment to the values of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) and reflect our beliefs that having diverse copyright ownership leads to a deeper mutual trust and an assurance that the playing-field remains equal for everyone involved.
Nooku Jam Stockholm
Nooku joined forces with the The Swedish Joomla! User Association to bring the first Nooku Jam to Stockholm on the 5th of February 2011. The Swedish Media Association has kindly offered their venue to host the jam. With two main rooms and multiple smaller break out rooms the venue really breaths creativity and can easily host 50 participants. Ideal for a Nooku Jam!
Nooku Framework is considered by many as one of the most interesting developments in the Joomlasphere of the last year. Not only because of the spectacular code reduction (up to 80%), but also for the many features that were previously unavailable to Joomla developers:
- Near-zero-code HMVC
- REST support
- Object Relational Mapping
- Out of the box security features
- Extensibility through CoC, DI, Mixins …
- Extreme re-usability
If you are a Joomla or PHP developer looking to learn how to build better Joomla extensions faster you don’t want to miss this. To cover our expenses for food and drinks we are asking a very small entrance fee. Don’t wait and register now!
Putting Nooku Server on a diet
Development of Nooku Server is blazing ahead. Integration of the multi-site features has started. If all goes as planned we should be able to demo a first workable version on our upcoming Nooku Jam in Rotterdam this weekend.
At Nooku we pride ourselves by doing more with less. And when we mean less we mean a lot less, as Stian nicely demostrated in his latest blog post.
Joomla 1.5 counts nearly 300k lines of code. That’s a lot of code ! Before we start improving Nooku Server, we would like to cut away any unused features.
To do that we need your help. We are curious to find out which Joomla core extensions you are using, and more importantly what features you are not using. If you have a moment please fill out our little form below and let us know. Thanks !
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Nooku Server, Joomla on steroids
Our partners, from the first participants to latest newcomers, each have played a role in the growth of Nooku. Not only have they contributed to build our project; they embody the philosophy of Joomla and Open Source: to choose collaboration over competition, to choose innovation over commerce, and to contribute to the benefit of everyone.
Over the past 3 years the combined efforts of our partners allowed us to build innovative Open Source technology: First Nooku Content, for multilingual management, and later Nooku Framework, a new brain for Joomla. Today, together with the Belgian Police we are taking a next step.
The Belgian Police and Joomla
Belgium being the small country it is counts no less then 190 police zones. Each of those 190 police zones has it’s own website, running different (proprietary) systems. After the release of Joomla 1.5 in 2008 most zones took the plunge and migrated their sites to Joomla 1.5. At the moment 130 zones are using Joomla.
Until recently all of those installations where hosted separately on one dedicated server. To increase the usability, ease of maintenance and continued growth, the Belgian Police asked us to help them to build a multi-site platform. And off course we said yes !
