After careful consideration, several cups of tea, and absolutely no pressure whatsoever from anyone, I have decided to stand in the forthcoming by-election in Clacton to become a Member of Parliament.
Human beings have always achieved more when they work together.
Every great advancement, from scientific discoveries to engineering achievements, has been built on the knowledge, creativity, and experience of many people. Even the ideas we often associate with individuals are usually the result of countless influences, conversations, discoveries, and improvements made by others before them.
There are few things more annoying than trying to copy a code sample and discovering you've missed the first line or grabbed half the paragraph below it.
If you've ever written documentation, tutorials, or technical blog posts, you've probably watched someone struggle to copy one of your code examples. They carefully drag the mouse across the code, accidentally select a bit of surrounding text, paste it into their editor, and then wonder why it doesn't work.
When people hear the acronym KPI (Key Performance Indicator), they almost instinctively think of business dashboards, targets, and performance metrics. But in a volunteer-driven open source community like Joomla, the real issue is not that we don’t have KPIs. It’s that we may be measuring the wrong ones.
Because in a community, KPIs should not just measure output. They should measure health.
We celebrate the wrong things.
I recently came across a quotation from Thomas Fuller that was written about medicine, but it immediately made me think about Joomla, open source, and the way we value contributions within our community.
Website performance has never been more important. Faster websites provide a better experience for visitors, rank better in search engines, and often convert more visitors into customers. One of the most important performance metrics measured by Google's Core Web Vitals is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Joomla 6.1 introduced two module-related features that many site builders may have overlooked: Module Versioning and Multilingual Module Associations. Neither feature is particularly flashy, but both solve real-world administration challenges and can make your Joomla sites easier to manage, maintain and update.
People see a feature in another CMS and ask why Joomla does not have the same capability built into the core. They see a new trend emerge and wonder why Joomla is not rushing to embrace it. They look at the thousands of extensions available and ask why so much functionality is left to third-party developers.
If open source is about anything, it is about people working together to build something none of them could create alone. That makes governance and leadership central to the health of any project, even though they are often discussed as if they are secondary concerns. The Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) model has become a familiar shorthand for successful projects led by strong individuals, but I have never found it a comfortable fit for how I believe communities should function or endure.
Congratulations, you discovered a hidden secret!