Many people asked about the JoomFish project recently. It looked like the project is not existing anymore. It looked like we are not supporting Joomla the way we did. Yes it looked like this, but actually it is all wrong.

The Joomla project made a tremendouse shift in its release and development strategy lately. With focusing on two different products (Plattform and CMS) and with time based releases the project now builds a plannable and predictable skeleton for professional 3rd party teams to build on their work on it. In the past each single release of Joomla was a major milestone and your update was not fast enough you have been lost in space. In the last year we saw two updates of the same kind and many, many people thought that they build their new website on a new stable version. My personal opinion is that both releases 1.6 and 1.7 had been pretty stable and perfectly for developers to test, learn and develop their extensions against them - however I have never recommended any of these versions to a client as a stable, long term reliable and not changing version. And this was excatly what the Joomla team said too. They have been very predictable in their work and now 2.5 is about to be released and with this we get a new long term, stable release for Joomla CMS including a stable plattform 11.4 - great!

Did we as JoomFish team waited all way long? No. We tested, we contributed to the core to help to overcome some issues we encountered and we prepared our next version for this new plattform and CMS. As stated all day long we have not released anything for 1.6 or 1.7 as this was pure development testing and not meant for any production usage. We shared our new github repository that allows very simple usage of the jf-future package and also worked on the new 2.2 release, the last one for Joomla 1.5 series.

To sum up, the JoomFish project is not dead, it still supports Joomla and even stronger now and of course we will release a version for Joomla 2.5!

First we will release JoomFish 2.2 with some additional enhancements for the general public. This build will be our transfer build to the new Joomla CMS 2.5 code based. This release is planned for this week.

Second we will release a Beta build of JoomFish 2.5 to our club members. This beta build is tested against Joomla CMS 2.5 B2 and should work in general. From eairly adopters we know already some bugs and will fix them on our way to the stable release. I personally assume that we will provide a stable version of the core features within a few weeks.

Last but not least we will provide updates to all our own add-ons and some new addtional features for easy migration and management of your translations. And of course to an update on our own website - as usual this comes last as it is not as important as your code.

Many people asking us quite often how to structure, prepare and build their multilingual websites. In fact often people start without thinking about a multilingual website and then they end up adding more and more translations to it. Based on this experience I created a slide deck that was presented first on the Joomla!Day in Athens 2011. The first part of the slides discuss the primary discussions you need to do while thinking about the idea that your site can become multilingual. Starting from the decisions related automated or manual translations until the facts of the cultural influence your new audience will bring. The second part of the presentation shows some best practices and possibilities how you can simplify the integration process for yourself as well as for your customers.

As I like to make this a little series about how multilingual websites can be build and what is important for them I'm very much interested in your feedback and experience. Please share your feedback to the presentation with me in our JoomFish forum or comment it on slideshare.

During J and Beyond 2011 the whole JoomFish team (developers, moderators and 3rd parties) meet and it was a great opportunity for us to talk about strategy, next releases and what else we need to have a look on. Before I'm going to update all our road-map documents let me summarize some of the outcome here in a brief blog post.

Community interaction and support

First of all let's talk about our support and communication towards the community. Our forum is the primary interactive channel we use and this will stay as it is. We will announce new releases and other project related information primarily in the forum and use twitter and other social media just for additional comments. If you have questions please raise them in the forum and not in comments, tweets or somewhere else. We are not regularly following these platforms.

To easy the usage of the forum we are going to restructure the sub-forums and will create a forum for each major release. So you will be able to find a 2.1 release sub-forum in the public area as well as a 2.2 release sub-forum within the club area. As soon as 2.2 is becoming the next public available forum we will move this sub-forum to the public community area. Feel free to answer all your questions related the core extension within these forums. To ease support make sure you post according to the version you use.

For all our add-ons we will create sub-forums as well. You will find a forum for JoomFish Plus Frontend Editing UI as well as the other add-ons soon within the club forum folder. The new forum groups will help to simplify the support and allow for a more detailed help in these cases.

Joom!Fish roadmap

According to the currently published development strategy of Joomla the version 1.6 and later again the version 1.9 will be those with long term support. Some other sources speak about 1.8 being the next with long term support as 1.5 has this kind of support already.

Our current vision is that 1.5 is the most reliable and stable version of Joomla and it is still maintained and down-loadable. Based on that we will support this version of Joomla at least until end of 2011 and plan to release version 2.5 as the last and final release for this code base. The result is that we will have 3 more feature releases of Joom!Fish with the version numbers 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5. The features are based on your feedback in our feedback system and include e.g. tabbed translation editing as well an optimization for the usage of 3rd party CCK's and other bigger extensions.

As 1.6 becomes the new origin of the new Joomla framework and CMS code base we will continue to finish this development and release it under the version number 2.6 as a migration scenario. The version 2.6 will be based on the JoomFish 2.2 code base and only enables it to be compatible with the Joomla 1.6 core. There will be no innovative features and technologies being implemented. With the versions 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9 we will provide versions that are compatible to the respective releases of those versions for the Joomla 1.5 code base.

The JoomFish version 3.0 becomes a brand new release with an innovative new way of editing translations and much more features. Some first ideas are discussed but you should not expect this version before 2012. Most of the important other features will be integrated earlier in the 2.x releases.

Events and more

We had a great experience with J and Beyond and we will continue to support events in the future. Next is the Joomla!Day in Greece and in autumn we will support the Joomla!Day in Hamburg Germany and the Joomla!Day in New York City. If you like to learn more about Joom!Fish, talk about the concepts or more one of these events is the best opportunity to meet with us.

The Joomla!Day in the Barcelona an awesome event. Not only that Barcelona is a town with so much history but also the community here in Catalonia and Spain has done a great job. The event was having their business day yesterday and I was told that there are about 100 people talking to each other in three different locations. Today there are about 150 people watching the first talks from Johan, Lorenzo and later on myself.

You can follow us on the live stream http://yfrog.us/7029nz

More news, pictures and other stuff can be found on twitter with the tag #jd09es.

Once a year the whole JoomFish team tries to meets in person to discuss the current status of the project and suggestions to improve. This year we took the opportunity to have the JoomlaDay Germany in the middle of Europe to get the team together. The event was great and we had a lot of people, users and customers talking to us during the various sessions. It was really impressive to see what some of our users have achieved with the JoomFish core extension. We will start to blog about these solutions and projects soon.

Results of the summit

The JoomFish summit itself was great too. We enjoyed a couple of more hours within Bad Nauheim and had quite some talks about the forum, project, development and other things. We had the great opportunity to meet in person what is always a good thing. I hope next time Robin can make it too.

Some of the results you might have seen already. We discussed a simplification of our forum structure which was already implemented beginning this week. Also we discussed about the development status for 2.1 and future versions. We agreed that 2.1 will be released very soon. The primary focus will be on a better user experience and documentation for the core extension pack. Therefore we are doing some changes to the default values and also make sure that the documentation is completely updated. An other part of our work has been the complete check of the code so that it is PHP 5.3 compatible. The versions 2.2 and other will include some more features as those listed on our feedback site.

Thinking about how you could contribute to Joom!Fish?

With the success of our online video tutorials we decided to do some more work in this direction. If you have suggestions or wishes please let us know about them in our forum. We are also actively searching for a contributor who is able to support us with creating video tutorials for the starting steps with JoomFish. Our vision is to have about 5-10 video tutorials each of max 5 minutes that explain the first essential steps with multilingual websites and the installation, configuration and usage of JoomFish. If you are intersted also please use our fourm and we will get in touch with you.

Next week the Joomla!Day Germany happens. This is going to be one of the most exciting events this year in Europe and the Joom!Fish team is proud to support this event financially and with most of our team members.

During the Community Day on Saturday 26th of September 2009 you will be able to meet our developers and moderators.On this day we will also have a very interesting discussion about multilingual websites and their integrations within Joomla. We are very happy that Johan Janssens from the Nooku project will also attend this session and we can discuss the complete picture of of multilingual solutions and may be a bit of their future within Joomla 1.6/1.7.

In order to support this unique opportunity we today start a "lucky draw" for one Community Day Pass within our forum. Check out the post and sent a reply until the official deadline. At this time we will do a draw from all forum members that replied (Membership in the forum is for free - so make sure you have registered your account ;-) ).

We are looking forward meeting you in Bad Nauheim next week

The Joom!Fish Team

PS: If you don't have you tickets yet, there are very less still available. Make sure to crap them before the event is sold out.

There is a new site ranking Joomla based websites based on their traffic and some other criteria. Among those sites listed - currently the top 500 sites based on Alexa - Joomfish.net is the middle field with rank 275.

I think this is already a great success and would like to encourage the Joom!Fish community to rank our site there too. Lets see if they run second test if we can improve our site and the usage of the project within the Joomla sphere.

Are you already following? Yes Joom!Fish also posts it's most recent news, information on twitter. At http://twitter.com/joomfish. As we are even answering some support questions via this forum it might be a good idea to follow us there. It can also be that we are going post some other pretty interesting infos there - why only blog?

Beside twitter you can also find information about the Joom!Fish project on various other platforms and web portals. If you are missing us on one of them, let us know. If it makes sense for us we will try to provide you more information about the project in your preferred environment as well.

It's about a year ago that we started our Joom!Fish Club. The new extensions, support and other services are helping more and more Joom!Fish club members. Of course we will celebrate this within our community. At the moment we discuss various ideas and options how to celebrate. One thing is for sure it will be like a little firework - or may be a big firework?

One thing is pretty sure, we will say thank you to all our club members of the first year. What does it mean? Everybody who signed up for a club membership until the 30th of June 2009 will take part in a set of "lucky draws". It doesn't matter if you are signed up for one month or a year, if you won your membership during one of our Joomla!Days or if you signed up on the 30th of June. Everybody who is in our database on the 30th of June 23.59 MET - is able to win. What? Stay connected and you will find out. Also make sure you are following us on twitter, who knows may be there will be some party too .

It is always very interesting if people asked you about information because they prepare a presentation of Joom!Fish. The last person asking was Jean-Marie Simonet (aka infograf768) who prepared a workshop during the Joomla!Day France 2009. Today I got his slides and it looks for me that his workshop titled "Internationalisation de Joomla et Joomfish" ("Internationalization with Joomla and Joom!Fish) was great fun. They covered basically all of the important aspects from understanding the various problems related to languages, the language system within Joomla and the usage of Joom!Fish. You can download his presentation (Frensh) as well as all other presentations from the event on the site.

I'm pretty sure many others have already presented Joom!Fish in their language. May be you can let us know and we can create a documentation section of third party presentation, documentations and other information in the various languages.

Many thanks again to Jean-Marie and the whole team in Paris. This was already the 3rd Joomla!Day in the capital of France and I'm sure it's not the last one.