JFusion Blog

I am back!!! Been on a sabbatical off sorts for a few months now. Been stuck with college, family, everything else! But simply put, it feels great to be back. And the timing couldn't get be any better. JFusion 2.x is coming people! When? That still is the million dollar question floating around and something to discuss in one of my future blog posts. I promise!

So what news do I have for you guys today?! Well we floated around a requirement for a Graphics/UI expert to join the team(via Twitter). A few proposals did come up but they were mostly from companies looking for a tie up with us. Not what we were looking for!

And then I realized I had the perfect guy sitting right beside me, well not quite literally but I hope you get the meaning. He happens to be my juinor in college and has quite a lot of experience that he brings to JFusion. He is an active volunteer of the IEEE just like me and a great friend of mine. Here is a quick introduction that he has supplied me with.

With great pleasure I would like to announce that we have a new programmer join the JFusion development team that will work on Joomla-Elgg integration. He is very experienced with Joomla development and already has got a working JFusion Elgg plugin that has user sync / dual login capabilities. Full frameless visual integration has already been shown to work as well (using Morten's universal frameless model) and John-Paul will be working to bring full Elgg integration to Joomla.

Its great to have you on board John-Paul and we are all looking forward to a complete Joomla-Elgg integration using JFusion.

Here's the profile of John Paul:

Yes you heard it right, JFusion is giving away 500,000 USD dollars to all of you for free and no strings attached! All you have to do is click on the download button on the top to get your JFusion package with an estimated worth of 500,000 USD.

This value is reported by ohlol (https://www.ohloh.net/p/jfusion/) that has been monitoring our SVN from the beginning of this project.  It monitors our SVN and calculates how many "programmer years" are needed to code JFusion. Assuming that a single programmer earns 55,000 USD per year and that a single programmer would take 9 years to write JFusion, you get the half a million dollar value.

It is truely amazing how fast JFusion is growing with the support of the Joomla communities and the many other communities that JFusion brings together. 

Finally, I have now published a new section on the website, called 'get involved'. You might have seen similar pages with other open source projects before, and that is because they aim to educate users on one of the most important factors of open source development: How you, like anyone else, can take an active part in the project you've come to love, and do your fair share to speed things up.

Now, about what you might be missing...

After a lot of internal discussion within the team (primarily the developers), we have come up with a new versioning mechanism. The emphasis is now on reaching a stable release as soon as possible.

From now on we shall have a regular version cycle consisting of per defined feature releases and subsequent bug fix releases. The versions will continue to contain three digits as they have till date but will signify both features releases and bug fix ones easily. Let's take the example of version 1.2.x. The version will be part of the 1.2 branch and the last digit x will be upped with every bug fix release, more or less the way it done for Joomla! as well. 1.2.0 will be the first version to take advantage of this new method.

As part of the discussion, it was also found that the way JFusion is packaged at the moment, it will be very difficult for us to call a release as stable. There are far too many extensions that are packaged into one mega package at the moment. All plugins, module, bots and other bits are packaged together and almost all are undergoing rapid development even as I write this blog entry.

In addition to that, not everybody integrates all software(s) that we support on the same site. Most integrate one, or at the maximum two software. So it kind of becomes cumbersome for them to have everything installed on their website. Same is the case with the Modules and Bots.