Flash and Joomla News by Eyezberg

Puki is a nice first person shooter with real time 3D FX, very nicely done.
A good demonstration of what Flash is now capable of.

At the moment, I am -again- getting very tired of Joomla. 

About 7 months ago, back around august 2005, there was a nice version of Mambo 4.5.3 around -on CVS. It had been worked on for about 1/2 a year, and was really starting to look good. Of course, it was still running on the "old" code, which is now completely rewritten for 1.5. But it had some very cool features, like a multilingual admin interface for example. During this time, I used to be on the Doc Team. It was already very hard to get information from the devs about new or changed features in order to document them for all end users.

Then in September, instead of the planned October beta release, we got the split creating Joomla. I wanted to stop any involvement with the project because I was very disappointed by the actions of the Core Team, decisions taken without communicating with anyone in the community, behind closed doors. For months, there was no information about the reasons for this walk away, because of legal restrictions it was said. No clear plan as to what was going to happen from there. Only: we want the code to stay free, so we leave, you'll have to be patient and wait.

Fast forward: 6 months later, May 2006, still waiting for the beta of the upcoming Joomla 1.5. 

There is still no published plan as to the future of the project (except "it's a framework"), as there is no clear plan or mission statement for the whole project. The project leader, Andrew Eddie, has disappeared. His last public apearance was his blog post about Mambo-Joomla differences. Nothing to do really with the project, as any Mambo-related discussions are also not desired on the forums either.

Whenever I ask questions about missing information, I get answers like "if there was information to publish, it would be done" or "we have no time / better things to do than publish announcements".

No-one seems really bothered by the lack of advance notification of all the missed release dates.

No-one seems bothered by many good folks starting to walk away -some more, some less- from Joomla. It's just "thanks for what you have done, see ya". Do people really think all these very involved persons -personalities!- are just leaving because of something better to do? I do not.

There's a whole bunch of Core Team members, yet the only ones anyone can guess at what they're doing is the coders working on 1.0.x (Rey) or 1.5 (Johan, Louis,  David, Andy mostly, according to SVN contributions), Multilingual content (Alex), or a better Open Source SEF solution (Predator). Not saying the others are not doing anything, just that no one knows..

There never has been, and there still is not, any communication about what else, non code related things are being undertaken, who is planning on attending which events, why these particular events were selected, what the general future direction of the project is going to be during the next few years, how the internal structure works, how communication is handled and how to best get in touch with someone from Core etc etc, the list could go on and on.

After a few years around, I think I know how "the system" works, where you can get information about some things, others are simply not available. Now imagine a new visitor, an interested person trying to get a deeper insight. Enough posts have proven this is very hard to do. 

The problem is, when you try on the forums to get more information than what is burried in various places by asking precise questions, you are likely to

• get no answer
• get links to all the achievements during the last X months -which of course are fabulous, but have not solved some fundamental issues
• be told to either help or stop asking and go look for a better project
• be told to check the SVN code to get the current status.

I really fail to understand how this all works (as no-one cares to share those "inner secrets / workings"..).

kper pretty much sums up the problem with the code part on the forums:
I just wanted to say that it can actually be quite difficult to see where you're upto, what is left to do and how long it will take when:

• you don't have the artificially imposed deadline of some expensive marketing campaign or the Christmas sales season,
• when your goals are therefore subject to adjustment to achieve the best possible result,
• when your definition of best possible result is therefore at least partially based on your ideals,
• when your available development hours go up and down all over the place because of real world commitments.

So although communication is a clear problem - we all know that we don't mind nearly so much waiting for a late train, or being held in a call centre queue, if we are kept informed of what is going on and where things are up to, - I'm not sure it is a problem which is all that quick and simple to solve. Otherwise, every train station and call centre would have real time information available.

I have actually worked in a call center, so I do know first hand how upset people get when initially they hear "your wait will be 2 mins", then after some time "your wait is now going to be 10 mins", and then "you'll have to wait MUCH longer, sorry" and finally "our lines are too busy currently, please ring back later. bip bip bip." You'd want to smash the phone..  (don't, might be useful still..)

The Core coders are the Chefs in the kitchen, getting the main course ready. No-one is allowed to peak in.
The restaurant is full, people are starting to get hungry.
We're out of appetizers (1.0.9).
Outside, passers-by are looking at the menu, and wondering, should I step in or not?
They ask one of the guests "is the food good here?"
"Yeah, great! So I heard at least, still waiting to taste. Can't be long anymore.."
The waiters run around, serving crackers, telling people the Chefs are preparing the best recipe EVER!
So it's going to be just a bit longer, would you like some more wine?
Then the first guests, too hungry to wait anymore, start to leave -and end up at McDonalds!

I'm not hungry anymore...