On Saturday 19 January 2020, the Extension Directory Team (JED) had an election for the team leader. Anibal Sanchez has been re-elected as the new Team Leader for an additional year.

JED 2020 Program

During my first year as JED Team Leader, we have achieved several successes, and the plan for 2020 is continuing the same line of initiatives and collaborations. In a nutshell, we manage the Joomla Extensions Directory in an open-minded way. 

We are trusted by the community to manage these assets, but we are only the representatives. If any Joomla user proposes an improvement, we follow through a process to decide if it is viable, check if we have the resources to implement it and get it done.

Our main achievements of 2019 are:

• New Ticketing System and Process Reorganization
• New Recently Updated / New & Noteworthy reports
• New support for Cloud Services and SaaS extensions
• JED4 Sprint (Jaz Parkyn, as Sprint Development Leader)
• JED Full-Text Search Improvements
• New Cards and Five-Star Reviews system
• Server Security Incident Response and Architecture Review
• Review Checking Process Improvements (IP-Detective migration)
• New Team Members: Carlos Camara and Tony Partridge
• New JED Developers: beat, Parvez Akther, Geraint Edwards, Jose Luque, Denis Ryabov, Abu Huraira Bin Aman, Oleg Micriucov, David Jardin, and Alejandro Schmeichler

The objectives for 2020 are, in order of priority, and defined boldly to fail in some of them:

• Modernization of the ecosystem of extensions and guidelines - JED4 Security Checkup of Extensions
• JED Checker CI Online - This is project scope: https://github.com/joomla/jed-issues/wiki/Extensions-Checker. Based on PHPCS WIP PR 246 / SonarQube.
• JED4 - JED 4 Project Scope Summary
• Renewal of JED general visual technology and design
• Templates on JED - JED Team Meeting - January 10th, 2020

Concerning to Joomla 4, we don't have yet official dates or a roadmap. After the Joomla Forum for the Future, we have hope that in February, we could have good news or confirmation about the next steps. We will plan accordingly if it is released this year.

To sum up, I invite you to continue collaborating with Joomla in 2020. Joomla is a fantastic piece of technology, with a sound architecture to create new modern web sites for individuals, small and medium companies. As always, the key is our creativity and innovation to learn from different perspectives and enrich our ecosystem.

It's renewal time! We have implemented a new ticketing system. The new system allows us to re-organize our processes to speed the response time of the initial replies and the following replies in a single communication thread.

In the context of the ongoing efforts to improve JED, we have implemented a new ticketing system. The new system allows us to re-organize our processes to speed the response time of the initial replies and the following replies in a single communication thread.

The Critical Improvement

The current JED system was initially implemented as a single extension that managed the directory, and the ticketing system. The objective was ambitious and it has been working fine. However, the ticketing implementation had several particularities that forced us to "answer and close" every ticket that we received after answering. 

At this time, we are moving away from the custom ticketing implementation and operating on a best-of-the-class extension for ticket management, following the practice of the rest of Joomla sites. As a consequence, we are standardizing our processes and following the organization standard now.

The new support process is the following. There are three support areas, and you can reach the team to address the associated issues :

• Listing
• Reported Extensions
• Reported Reviews

Submit a Ticket

To access the new ticket submission form, you have to be registered and logged in to find it in the main menu "Support / Submit a Ticket".

My Tickets

To access your tickets, you can find them in the main menu "Support / My Tickets".

The tickets are answered following these guidelines:

• Every ticket is answered within seven days by our team of volunteers.
• Tickets remain open until they are answered.
• After seven days, if an answered ticket does not receive more replies, it is auto-closed. If the closed ticket gets a new response, then it is re-opened.
• Tickets can be answered by email.
• As an additional enhancement, extension updates must be uploaded to the listing, and they cannot be submitted via the ticketing system.

A few points to take into account

As always, please remember these tips before submitting a new extension:

• The install name of your extension MUST be exactly like the listing name. 
• The new extensions are required to implement the Joomla! Update System as detailed in this documentation page: https://extensions.joomla.org/support/knowledgebase/item/joomla-update-system-requirement/
  
• The new extensions must pass the JED Checker validations. These are the Submission Error Codes https://extensions.joomla.org/support/knowledgebase/item/submission-error-codes/

 Do you want to collaborate with JED?

Most of the time, we are reviewing new extensions and looking for ways to improve the site. If you want to give us a hand, please, join the team to collaborate and help the community.

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash

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The development of Joomla 4 and JED4 is progressing well. For us, it implies a renewal of the practices to the current times. Today, we introduce the specific support of Cloud Services and SaaS extensions.

When JED was originally created, the ecosystem consisted of simple components, modules, and plugins. Nowadays, the average size of an extension has increased and there are even extensions peaking at 15 MB. On top of this, the cloud has evolved and Joomla sites are now frequently integrated with independent cloud services.

We have realised that our current rules and decision-making processes needed a review to better support these extensions, so we’ve introduced a new ruleset for cloud-based business models.

The GPL license still applies to the distributed extension files, but the subscription models offered by cloud service providers can vary - a number of examples are listed in the rules below.

These are the new rules for Cloud Services / SaaS extensions:

List C2.3: Entries bridging to Cloud Services / SaaS

The full checklist can be found here: https://extensions.joomla.org/support/knowledgebase/item/jed-entries-checklists/

Do you want to collaborate with JED?

Most of the time, we are reviewing new extensions and looking for ways to improve the site. If you want to give us a hand, please, join the team to collaborate and help the community.

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash