Accurate listings? It's a lot of work!

Voting and Reviews by Users

There are more than 115,000 registered users voting in the Joomla Extensions Directory, and most of them do it the right way.  In the past I've talked about reasons we reject reviews from users, but we've never really opened up the process we use to make sure the votes are valid, honest and accurate.

Because the JED is the most complete and accurate listing of Joomla extensions available, its traffic is high and as such listings are valuable.  The temptation to influence a JED listing is clearly great, and we spend quite a bit of our time monitoring voting patterns and preventing abuse. Because of the value of that traffic, we believe it is our duty to make sure the listings are as accurate and honest as we possibly can make them.

Voting and Reviews by Extension Owners

The vast majority of the 1600+ extension owners in the JED use the system properly, and for that we're grateful.

When an extension developer decides to influence their listing with fraudulent votes, they are hurting not only the other developers but the users that trust the ratings in the JED.  They take our time from working on extension and review approval, and slow the process down for everyone.

On October 24, 2009, the geek factor at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, jumped even higher as representatives from 124 GSOC projects swarmed in for the weekend 2009 GSOC Mentor Summit.

Steve Fisher and I were lucky enough to represent your favorite CMS. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet people from so many other FOSS projects and enjoy the geek-gadget-grab bag that is the Googleplex.

Three giant flat-screen panels display a joy-stick-controlled Google Earth as you enter. The effect is like riding in a helicopter over anywhere on the planet. Turn around to see a wall-size display of words that people from around the world are searching as you watch. Another wall shows a world map with dots representing how many people are online from different areas.

Despite all of the gadgets, the real draw for me was the opportunity to meet, talk to, and learn from the other attendees. The take-away items came in two flavors, general and specific.

We're all done! Enjoy! (Updated below with open issues)

Due to some awesome shifts with JoomlaCode to get newer, more powerful servers (thanks again to Rochen). However as a part of this we're going to have some scheduled downtime for parts of JoomlaCode as we reconfigure the system into a new environment. I'm intending this post to be a sort of rolling update page as I work through all of the items and get the different bits and pieces finalised with Rochen.

As these are pretty significant changes, I'm hoping to keep the amount of disruption to a minimum. This is one of the first times I've personally tried to shift JoomlaCode as a whole beast so I'm hoping for the best and expecting some issues to fall out. I'm aiming to structure the moves in such a way that we're going to cause as little disruption, move in as small a chunk as possible and get everything tested.

The deadline for this project is the end of November, however I hope to be up and running at least a weekend before then. More updates as they come to light.

14th/15th Nov 2009 Downtime

We're planning some significant (8 hour chunk) down time for JoomlaCode over the coming weekend (Saturday 14th November Midnight GMT to 8am). This will impact on all web based services - downloads, SVN, trackers and project services. During this time we are hoping to migrate the database from its current environment into a new server. This is the first of a few moves to migrate services from the current hardware onto newer hardware.

During this process we'll be upgrading from PostgreSQL 8.3 to PostgreSQL 8.4 for the database backend of JoomlaCode. The last PostgreSQL upgrade, from PostgreSQL 7.4, brought JoomlaCode to a new level of stability. Recently we've been having issues with the stability of the database layer with JoomlaCode so we're hoping a PostgreSQL upgrade and some beefier hardware will help us chew through even more queries as we grow.

At this point in time there is no major maintenance planned for the Sunday however if there is an issue shifting the database server, I will be redoing this again on the Sunday. For testing purposes the system may appear to be online during the scheduled downtime and hopefully I will be able to restore service earlier.

15th Nov 2009 Downtime

Due to incredibly success and speed on the 14th, the plans for next weekend have been advanced to the 15th. All services are offline as off Sunday 15th November at midnight for eight hours or until the down time is completed.

Open Issues

At the moment I'm working to resolve a few issues:

• On the 14th and 44th minute (or there abouts), JoomlaCode may issue a Forbidden error message. This is due to a bug in the way that Subversion 1.4+ (including 1.6.6) appears to parse the authorisation file that wasn't an issue for Subversion 1.2 that we were previously on. I've filed a bug on their tracker but I am doubtful that it will be resolved any time soon.
• ViewVC appears to be only returning the first revision for some reason. Not sure why but I also tried ViewVC 1.1.2 and it did the same so I'm still trying to work out what is going wrong. It appears like it is only returning the first revision of the repository. ViewVC is what powers the "scmsvn" pages for a project.
• There appears to be an issue with some of the mailing lists. Some systems are having handler issues (sendmail isn't liking the PHP backends in some places) and the system is also refusing some inbound emails because of identity problems. As a result items like commit mailing lists and some bug notifications may not work properly. Some emails however are working and being sent so as to the exact problem I'm presently uncertain.

Again, I'd like to reiterate the thanks to Rochen for helping to make this happen. Without the great, professional services provided by Rochen, the web infrastructure for Joomla! would not be the same.

Joomla 1.6 will include a new component and plugin called Redirect.  Its main function is to provide a mechanism to record 404 "not found" errors, and to give the Web site owner the ability to redirect those to another page if desired.

This year has been a terrific whirlwind of activity in the Joomla!Day world.  With events on six continents, spanning the entire year, the community has rallied together to share lessons learned, make new friends, and help make the Joomla project better.  At some points, there were multiple Joomla!Days happening around the world in the same week!

In our efforts to continue to expand the outreach of Joomla, and also to better plan for the upcoming year, I'm looking to the community to help me put together a list of Joomla!Days you'll be hosting in 2010.  This will allow OSM to better understand the events budget allocation needs for the year, as well as providing the community with a long-view schedule of events for the entire year.

So, do you have a Joomla!Day you're planning to host?
Join the discussion!

Please note that posts to this forum thread will not be considered official requests, but simply a way for us to get an idea of the 2010 event expected needs.  We want to make sure to get the broadest idea for the calendar, and then receive the official requests separately as soon as organizers' plans have solidified.

If you'd like to submit an official Joomla!Day request, please use our form to do so.

Here's to an exciting 2010 Joomla!Day calendar!