Building the Ship
Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 12:44 pm
It is good to see some great people here interested and eager to get this ship sailing, I'm turning my gaze from the horizon, down to the wood before me. My interest is now building the vessel for our eventual 'casting off' and heading for the deep waters.
tjay has gotten off to a great start. My goal is to come up with some decisions based on feedback for how we'll proceed with our first small group. We have a few items that we need to decide:
1. Choosing a mode of communication.
This needs to be easily accessible, easy to use, and best suit the group. The forum, as I said, is only the beginning. We're going to need a centralized system to allow communication and collaboration for each Joomla project (or programming) group. (we'll call these JPG's for short). We want to make sure that for each JPG we have, they have their own space and ways to easily find who is involved with the group, and how to contact them. We'll be dealing with time barriers and a myriad of other issues, and keeping communication lines open will be key.
2. Choosing a platform to work on.
Although I do love Dreamweaver, I don't think it's best platform, first and foremost, because it may be cost prohibitive for some. We'll need to find an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that will suit the group and, more importantly, free. Louis was kind enough to throw J!Code out there. I think using a product that the dev team endorses seems to make sense. Thoughts? I haven't used it myself, but I am sure we can start up a thread as we take a look at the tool and get a feel for it.
3. Programming Experience.
I think we're going to make some assumptions here that the people involved should have had some programming experience with PHP. You don't have to be at the level of a professional developer, but at least understand the basics of programming and the programming language. Some of the more advanced concepts with object oriented programming and classes are a must, but I don't expect everyone to have a grasp on them. I know for myself I need some practice with classes, and I can forsee we spending some time on these concepts, perhaps a whole group session if the interest is there.
I don't want to alienate the new programmers, and if we start to see enough people who are interested with little or no experience, we can set up a group for those who want to learn PHP.
SQL is another important component in programming for a system such as this, but I don't think we're going to require people to have a great deal of experience with it. I think we'll have enough people involved who have a very good handle on SQL to help out where necessary. I don't think we'll do any specific focus on SQL to start our first group, but we can definitely look at training for that as well down the road as we see more people get involved.
4. Getting to know Joomla.
For the majority of us, we may have had some periphery experience with Joomla and the back end. There is a vast amount of information to get us started with designing a component (and we have some great people involved like tjay who has 'been there, done that' with extending Joomla functionality. Part of the first group, after we decide on some small component projects, will be understanding how a program interfaces with Joomla, and what is available to work with. Ideas for small projects here are welcome.
That should be enough for people to get their head around and think about to see where we want to go with this. Your feedback is important, and we appreciate your efforts to help shape this project!
tjay has gotten off to a great start. My goal is to come up with some decisions based on feedback for how we'll proceed with our first small group. We have a few items that we need to decide:
1. Choosing a mode of communication.
This needs to be easily accessible, easy to use, and best suit the group. The forum, as I said, is only the beginning. We're going to need a centralized system to allow communication and collaboration for each Joomla project (or programming) group. (we'll call these JPG's for short). We want to make sure that for each JPG we have, they have their own space and ways to easily find who is involved with the group, and how to contact them. We'll be dealing with time barriers and a myriad of other issues, and keeping communication lines open will be key.
2. Choosing a platform to work on.
Although I do love Dreamweaver, I don't think it's best platform, first and foremost, because it may be cost prohibitive for some. We'll need to find an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that will suit the group and, more importantly, free. Louis was kind enough to throw J!Code out there. I think using a product that the dev team endorses seems to make sense. Thoughts? I haven't used it myself, but I am sure we can start up a thread as we take a look at the tool and get a feel for it.
3. Programming Experience.
I think we're going to make some assumptions here that the people involved should have had some programming experience with PHP. You don't have to be at the level of a professional developer, but at least understand the basics of programming and the programming language. Some of the more advanced concepts with object oriented programming and classes are a must, but I don't expect everyone to have a grasp on them. I know for myself I need some practice with classes, and I can forsee we spending some time on these concepts, perhaps a whole group session if the interest is there.
I don't want to alienate the new programmers, and if we start to see enough people who are interested with little or no experience, we can set up a group for those who want to learn PHP.
SQL is another important component in programming for a system such as this, but I don't think we're going to require people to have a great deal of experience with it. I think we'll have enough people involved who have a very good handle on SQL to help out where necessary. I don't think we'll do any specific focus on SQL to start our first group, but we can definitely look at training for that as well down the road as we see more people get involved.
4. Getting to know Joomla.
For the majority of us, we may have had some periphery experience with Joomla and the back end. There is a vast amount of information to get us started with designing a component (and we have some great people involved like tjay who has 'been there, done that' with extending Joomla functionality. Part of the first group, after we decide on some small component projects, will be understanding how a program interfaces with Joomla, and what is available to work with. Ideas for small projects here are welcome.
That should be enough for people to get their head around and think about to see where we want to go with this. Your feedback is important, and we appreciate your efforts to help shape this project!
.