 Hei there, welcome, my name is Deteal and I'm a bit of an interloper here, I'm a WordPress developer. I work full-time as a freelancer doing front-end and I was invited to come along and just talk about community or talk about WordPress or actually start building some bridges between our communities which is basically what I'm here to do today because I know an enormous amount about the WordPress community but less about the Drupal and Joomla communities, I've actually invited some others ring-ins to actually help contribute to this conversation. So what I wanted to talk about is what it is that we can learn and teach one another. Now I can tell you again an awful lot about the WordPress community but in actual fact what I really want to do is turn this into a bit of an introduction about all of our communities and also invite conversation with everybody and actually turn the second half of this presentation into a bit of a panel just because I feel like we all have something to contribute to this particular conversation. So I'm going to start off by introducing Brian Gilbert who's going to come and talk a little bit about the Drupal community which is probably the one you guys know more about and probably the one that I know less about having less to do with that myself. And then I'm going to hand over to Patrick Jackson who is one of the lead organisers for Joomla in Melbourne and then I'll wrap up this part of the conversation with a little bit of an introduction to what the WordPress community looks like and then hopefully we can have a bit of a chat about that. Over to you, Brian. Hi everyone. I assume I'm mostly preaching to the converted here so I'll probably go a little bit faster. Convert me. Convert you, yeah. Didn't I do that last time? So I'm Brian Gilbert. I organise the Drupal Meetups in Melbourne and have helped organise previous Drupal conferences in Australia and mentored at International Drupal Conference a couple of times as well. So where do I point it? I'll just use the keyboard. It's fine. So these slides were used at another event where it was breaking into open source and so my angle of attack was about my story in Drupal so really when you start out, and this should be true for any of us, when you first start out in an open source project, no one really knows who you are and really the way to get known is to don't just stand there and actually get involved and you may have heard or depending on what talks you've been to some of the ways to do that in Drupal are get on IRC, start being active in issue queues and so on. So you should actually just do that. And then the other things you can do depending on your means is actually contribute back to open source. So my company Reality Loop, between three developers, we have around 70, somewhere between 70 and 80 contributed modules on Drupal.org where a Drupal Association supporting partner, so we pay money to the Drupal Association for that, which helps maintain Drupal.org infrastructure, would probably help towards the DA to accelerate grants and so on. And we also organised the events locally, which I've been doing since 2009. So I was one of the co-organisers of Drupal Down Under 2012. In the last year or so I've probably trained almost 600 people on how to get involved in contributing with Drupal, setting up their local development environment. So that was in Drupalcon, Austin. That was in Drupalcon, Amsterdam. And then codes for instance at Drupalcon, Amsterdam. Drupalcamp Melbourne, which is the first one that had been run in many years, which we ran earlier this year. So it's really the best way to be part of the community is to give back to that community. You'll gain a lot from that. And I think it's, you know, any of the CMS projects we're talking about, I think it's the community is what makes it worth it at the end of the day. That's my take on it. Hopefully we all have a common goal about, you know, what we're aiming towards is to, well, in the bigger picture it's kind of make the world a better place because we're using tools to build sites that help people do things hopefully. And there's just some links. So it's a bit hard to read here. But these will be on the internet when it gets transcribed to YouTube or whatever. So, yeah, that's pretty much it. Unless people have any direct questions, yeah. They're all, oh, yes? Miig, hang on. So Miguel asked if I think there's anything unique about the Dribble community that makes us better or different than the other communities. I don't know enough about the other communities, but I think the real strengths of the Dribble community is that the community and I guess you don't, or in my case I didn't really get a sense for that until I went to a Dribblecon, which is Dribblecon San Francisco. And even more so than the conference was going to the contribution sprints after the conference and the coders lounge during the conference. So at Dribblecons they usually have somewhere that's pretty much 24-7. You can go and just code. And I was going to the coders lounge every night until two o'clock in the morning or something like that. I got my first patch in Dribblecore for the Dribble7 and she was the one that committed it. And you get to meet those people and that's where you really do get a feel for they're not people that you can't interact with because they're Uber in some way or anything like that. And I think, I imagine it would be very similar in any case, it's the interactions and the connections you make, the friends you meet are what make it special for me anyway. And I can't imagine that they would be greatly different. I think the major difference that I've seen in the Dribble space is that we don't really have an ecosystem of paid modules that the other systems tend to have. If you want really good modules, often you've got to pay something to get them. Whereas in Dribble, there's a lot of awesome modules and they're all there for you to use. So yeah, that's pretty much it. Yes, so they asked what's the difference between a Dribble camp and this conference. So a Dribble camp that we ran was a much smaller event. So we capped it, which was partially based on venue at, I think, 50 people. And the tickets were $5 and you got a shirt and food. And the people who came actually were the presenters. So we didn't have a defined schedule of presenters for the event until the day of the event. Yeah, we ran it like a bar camp. And then this is probably more of a... I think they have similar to a summit in Dribble talk. And then Dribble camps are now getting to 3,000 to 4,000 people at a conference. Yeah, big. Yes. So the question was if you don't know anything about Dribble, can you come to the sprints and help? I would say yes, there would definitely be something you can help with. So there's many... You don't have to be a coder to be able to contribute to Dribble. So there's documentation would probably be a really good place. Are you from the library as well? No. OK. I'll just assume if you're sitting next to me, I thought maybe. Yeah, so a lot of... If you feel... And there will be assistance on the day in doing some of this process, if you feel that you can get Dribble running on your machine, on your laptop, then contributing to documentation, which just means testing, trying to create basic content and finding problems and documenting issues you come up against would be awesome because as Andy said at the start, we need people testing stuff to find things because there's a lot of core contributors. Well, I don't know if this is 100% true, but there is some belief that some of the core contributors don't actually build sites. They build core. And so they know the problems that people come up against, but they're not actually doing those things every day and finding those problems. We're getting more people involved in core, helps make it a better product because the last presentation with Lee Rollins was, you know, we have itches that we want to scratch to fix problems, whereas some of the core contributors are possibly just making a better system than what Dribble 7 was. Obviously, they're taking the feedback of everyone on the issues from the issue queue, but I think, yes, there is definitely something you can do if you can. So we have two events a month. We have on the second Monday of the month, which this month is a public holiday, so we're not having it, but we have a presentation-based meet-up, which is from 6pm at, I think, if you go to meetup.com slash Drupal Melbourne, that's the address, Richard will be able to give you the link if you need. We usually have one or two people present something, so the people who are using Drupal, sometimes we get people, so the last time we had someone from Oracle come and talk about database stuff, and then on the third Saturday of the month, every month, at the State Library from midday until 4pm, we have mentoring where anyone can come and have zero experience with Drupal if you want, and we'll help you get a Drupal site up and you just ask questions and we'll do our best to help you out. Yeah, no problem. That's right, it's the Joomla slide. That's me, good. I'm Patrick Jackson. I'm with the Melbourne Joomla user group. I've been using Joomla since it came out in 2007. 2006, 2002. Joomla was originally a fork of a project called Mambo, and Mambo was originally developed right here in Melbourne, so at the time that I was hunting for a CMS, I think Drupal might have been in its infancy about that time. Maybe a very early version. An earlier version that might not have been as user-friendly as I was hunting for, and I think WordPress made me scratch my head a bit at that time as well. Mambo sort of clicked, and then when it forked to Joomla, I stuck with that, and I've become a bit of a Joomla consultant, consultant in Melbourne. We've got about 120 people in the Melbourne user group that sort of semi-regularly come along, and I've probably done work for about 50 of those over the last couple of years, so it keeps things interesting, seeing what other people are developing, and then scratching my head as to why they did it. So to get involved with Joomla in Melbourne, we started the group once Joomla had forked in 2007, three of us in a pub near Melbourne Uni, and then since then we've gone through and held four conferences. The last one was at Swinburne at the start of last year, and then nationally, the Joomla conference schedule moves around, and the day conferences or weekend conferences are actually called a Joomla Day, and then we have other events in the Melbourne Joomla user group. We're currently on the fourth Wednesday of the month at Swinburne and Hawthorne. We're very glad to have a sponsor. They helped us with our venue for the conference last time as well, which considerably saved some of the costs there. So we've got a mixture of members with various experience. We've probably got probably about 30% of the group are people that are actively supplying Joomla hosting and implementing Joomla sites, and then the rest is a mix of graphic designers who've chosen Joomla. Some program is a number of hobbyists, so people that have only built their one site and the questions they've generally got are to do with their very specific things. Some of us that have got many more sites have got a number of questions that cause us to scratch our heads, and it's always a good place to try and share those ideas and troubleshoot, which is where some of that work's come from for me. So we're looking always at what the audience is after and we're in the process of seeing what types of things people want to know about. Because we've got such a diverse user base, it ranges from sort of just going through what the next version of Joomla's going to bring and 3.4 came out a few weeks ago, so that's sort of the hot topic at the moment in the group. And we're also looking now at getting more onto the programming side and so some of the sessions later in the year will be on how to contribute issues back and fixes back into the Joomla project, how to set up development environments and use GitHub and things like that to help with fixing the little bugs that people find in Joomla along the way, and that should correspond into helping other extension developers in Joomla to fix their issues when they arise as well. I've got an Evernote note on my computer that's currently got about 30 issues that they're not actually bugs in the system as such, they're more just user interface features that need some improving. And I myself have got to learn the GitHub side of things shortly to get going with all of that. So nationally we've got Joomla.org.au and there's about eight Joomla user groups around the country at the moment and they're all reasonably active. The Sydney one's actually just forked for one of a better word and so now there's a Sydney one that meets in the CBD and then a north-west Sydney one that meets out near Blacktown and they're both quite active there. We're just revamping the National Organisation website and the forum there gives the advantage of giving support in local time so if we've got users that need some help they can jump on there and quickly get an answer or ideally try and get an answer. Quite often it might be that we point them in the right spot to go on the global forums and things like that. And then there's the Joomla project itself which is it doesn't have a figurehead company as such. This open source matters is the foundation that's been founded to manage the funding and development of the project and the corporate governance of the project but we don't have something like automatic or accurate to drive what's at the top there. So it's a very volunteer contributed based organisation in that regard which has its pros and cons obviously but at the moment it's functioning reasonably well and the number of people that are involved now has been rapidly increasing over recent years. So the forum at Joomla.org gets over a couple of hundred thousand hits a month at the moment and it's certainly a place to start if you've got any questions with Joomla and then the documentation is constantly undergoing a revamp and I was recently involved in a project rewriting the documentation about upgrading Joomla because we've got a couple of older versions that really end of life now and so they need to actually try and encourage people to upgrade and those upgrades have been a bit they need a bit more planning than just a single click so now the roadmap for Joomla has a single click process moving forward though the current version that just came out is a few extensions that then have some glitches that we're waiting for the next sub release to come out to fix some of that and then the other parts there's a large translation team Joomla's got over 40 core installation language files at the moment and there's sub projects that aren't fully maintained for another 25 languages at the moment the extensions directory at Joomla has over 10,000 extensions on it that's been recently revamped so it's got more of a fushier marketing side to it but that's a mixture of free and paid extensions there I'll ask because all the components on the WordPress site go through review process so the Joomla extension directory is a little bit less stringent there is a review process they'll scan it for malware and other bits and pieces there but I don't know that it says stringent a review process and you can also you can also develop extensions for Joomla but not actually put them on the extensions directory but from a marketing point of view you just lose entire access to a user base there the Joomla installation process has increased dramatically in the last two years with that and you can now install from the web using the web interface though they've just had a revamp of part of that so that I think is still down for another week while they fix an issue there and then obviously there's issue reporting and the GitHub interface is there to contribute back to the actual code of the project there's also a number of working groups an ever-growing global marketing team which take on various projects like the update thing I was talking about but also major releases and then we've got smaller sub-projects in that to help new users and try and increase the word of mouth about Joomla over the next 12 months the developers and the product leadership team are both in charge of actually working out what features are going to go into the new builds and then managing the teams to get that to happen the documentation team obviously write up all the instructions and that's an ongoing task as things change periodically in the new versions you've got the extension directory editors and reviewers sites and infrastructure team manage all the Joomla sub-domains so there's several of those that you'll see on the slides forum moderators and translators so there's plenty of ways that people can get involved in the project so volunteers.joomla.org is actually a new portal that's been added where you can go and find out who's contributing to the project and it basically gives credit to all the volunteers that are part of the project and that quite often can lead to if you find the right person they might be looking for some work or be able to help you with what you've got more targeted that is the resources directory where people can list themselves as a Joomla provider and so people can go and try and find someone to help them with the project we're trying to recruit some more Australian Joomla folk to get on that and get set up so that we've got more than I think 11 when I look past around the country so those 11 have got a bit of a monopoly I think there's only three that are listed in Melbourne at the moment and then the showcase is a site of a directory of all the different types of sites that you can see in Melbourne that's where you see globally that are using Joomla so if you want more information on the Melbourne Joomla user group you can go to meetup.com slash melbournejug and then we're on Twitter there's the national site and then the global site there and that's the feature that came out so we're wordpress.com have hosted wordpress sites part of that Joomla.com has just been released in the last couple of months and that has now is now giving a free service similar to wordpress.com where you can quickly install a Joomla install and give it a play around with it and then either build a full site or then take it and put it on different hosting if you need to customise it more than we've gotten there so yeah, cool. Any questions? From the project contributors we've got a large user base but not so much a contributor base at the moment so that's where the target activities this year is to try and pull more people in I'm jealous of the tenancy because we had 120 to our conference and that was sort of in this type of stream we'd be lucky to I think I did a presentation at our conference where I was up against one of the international keynotes that we had and so my presentation went to five beginners on how to start up Joomla say looking at how we can increase the community and get the people out the door I was talking to Dee earlier that the WordPress conference is held on the weekend and we've held the Joomla ones on the weekend one of the things that we've always got an issue in trying to find out so traditionally we've got either small business operators that are doing Joomla themselves or hobbyists coming to the conferences on the weekends and we really want to find out as people that are actually using Joomla and their employees to try and get them along to increase the community. Thanks. So predictably I'm here to talk about WordPress and the WordPress community this is who we are we're developers, we're users we're designers and we're all enthusiasts I think you'll find a lot of similarities between what Brian and Patrick have already said through it pretty quick. You can find us at Meetups we have in fact just gone to four Meetups a month we have the word Checks Meetup which happens usually on the first Thursday or first Saturday of the month this was an initiative started to actually get more and more women involved and contributing to WordPress talking about it coming and speaking at Meetups just to create a place where it's comfortable a bunch of us girls who've got involved are uncomfortable sharing what we know or intimidated really and this was a place to actually kind of mediate that a little bit we don't actually restrict attendance only to women and we've had a lot of men come along and contribute as well but it was just an interesting experiment which continues and seems to be getting reasonably popular which is pretty cool. We have the users Meetup which is a second Wednesday of every month and this is last year we actually followed through a program where we introduced this is how you set up WordPress, this is how you add plugins, this is how you add a theme or customize the look of your site and this is how you do SEO and so we basically worked through a program through the whole year of getting users from go to woe which we videoed and then made that available for those who couldn't kind of be there from the start of the program. This year it'll be a little bit different and we're kind of seeing what crops up for interest's sake throughout the course of the month before we plan what's happening for the next one and then we'll have the users Meetup and that happens on the third Wednesday of the month so there's one coming up in a few weeks and then we predictably talk about all things code. We also have WordCamps which I guess are quite similar to this kind of event where we all get together we talk WordPress like Patrick mentioned we tend to have them on a weekend and usually over two days we all often have a developer and or a user stream and the thing with WordPress events is that we try and keep them as accessible and so the cost of them is really, really low which means A, a mad flurry on the part of the organisers to get enough sponsorship to cover the costs of the venue and so on but also a big push for ticket sales. Our last one that I organised was here in Melbourne in April of 2013 we had 300 people attending so we're pretty happy with that we're hoping to have another one in Melbourne this year there's also one in the works for Brisbane which is pretty cool. We had one in Sydney last year which was also pretty well attended. WordCamp looks like, looks pretty familiar looks very much like what we're seeing from here and there are WordCamps happening basically every weekend of the year around the world. I had the opportunity to go to WordCamp San Francisco which is the kind of headline event of the year last year and had some time in the US to hang out and one of the cool things was was like okay so I need to find something to do I had a week to fill in so I get on this site and go oh hey there's a WordCamp in North Carolina maybe I can go to that which of course then turns into a picture for a presentation and the opportunity to speak but it also meant that that jump from one side of the country to the other was the tax deduction which was also a pretty awesome benefit. You can also find the WordPress community on WordPress.tv and so every event that we schedule actually gets recorded if possible certainly all of the WordCamps one of the big plugs from Foundation which is the kind of body that looks after the branding and looks after WordCamps their big suggestion is please video the event and that we can make this available to other users and so this whole website is freely available for people to get access to any of the video from those WordPress.org is the first place that a lot of people will find themselves this is where they go to download their own safe hosted version of WordPress where all the documentation is it's where the forums are where people can get involved to talk about it and it's where you can also get involved and here are the some of the ways. Again, very predictable, very similar to most of the other open source projects that we've looked at. You can do documentation you can do support outreach which is organising meetups, WordCamps and events the accessibility polyglots which is our huge translation or a group that are involved in the huge translation project and much like you guys have been talking already translation is a really big deal for WordPress and a big push is happening into getting more and more people translating the core and then of course translating plugins and themes for it as well you can also of course get involved at a deeper code level doing the UI and UX the matter which is all of the things that support these things like running the WordPress.org website plugins, mobile and of course contributing to core itself much like the others you can find us at meetup.com and WordCamps at wordcamp.org WordPress TV at wordpress.tv and then the contribution section which is make.wordpress.org clearly this is only of some interest because you guys are all Drupal dev but I thought the thing that I found and certainly in the last conversation that I had with these guys when we were at General Assembly and there were a couple of other people presenting their experiences with community and community organising and back to we're actually far more alike than we are different and so one of the things that I kind of wanted challenge or wanted to get involved in coming along here and why I was so excited to actually have this opportunity was because I keep coming up with things like this and unfortunately you probably can't read that too well but I tweeted yesterday so I'm presenting at Drupal South tomorrow seriously do I wear a WordPress t-shirt or not and this was the suggestion of the t-shirt that I should wear now it's funny because it's true no, I'm sorry but this is the kind of thing that I hear all the time ooh Drupal, Joomla, you know and what I would really love is as people get to see that we are in fact all very similar and I know that I really love to think that I'm platform agnostic and that if I had a project that would do much better on Drupal that I would suggest somebody go to that the fact is that everything I've wanted to do I can do on WordPress and so I keep using it but this is the kind of conversation that I kind of go it's funny but it's also kind of disappointing because we do all have such incredible similarities and so I guess my challenge is to try and spark some conversation around what can we do that actually changes the way that we talk about each other opening up events to each other certainly like me having this opportunity but next time I'd love to drag along half of our team and go come on you guys let's talk to these people because they're developers too and they're PHP devs too and they're making great products as well now this is I guess where I kind of want the conversation to start erstwhile organiser Donna asked this question radical treasonous thought follows and Drupal because its community cares more about its users and I'm going to start opening the conversation I guess with this I'm less concerned quite frankly about who has more market share I am concerned about what do you guys think in terms of what we see about each other I mean you may know less about WordPress than I know about Drupal but I kind of want to ask these kind of questions what does it look like how does that affect our ongoing development or our ongoing contribution and what would embracing users change what we do as developers of any given platform so that's my question is there anybody who's brave enough to answer and if you would would you mind coming down and answering it in the mic so that we can record that a big panna it's even scarier actually somebody having a record of what you actually thought I thought that was a movement to go to the mic okay thank you there's no right or wrong answers I'm as curious to learn from you guys as I am to tell you what we do well I used to develop WordPress quite a few years ago and one of the big differences I found was that WordPress seemed to be for developers seem to have more documentation around stuff versus Drupal WordPress also seemed to be a little bit more user friendly from the get go for users just to be able to use it versus Drupal whereas Drupal can set it up so you know one of the things when web check whose name just flew completely out of my head was presenting this morning was that I was watching all this kind of front end dev stuff and I'm like oh my god that's starting to look like WordPress like I'm like kind of yeah that's awesome and kind of they're going to start snapping out of heels really soon so certainly that kind and then I'm like well actually hang on it doesn't matter we're all the same in theory so I really like I think you're right I think actually starting to think about how people use what we're using is it going to make a massive difference to what we carry on building not only just for one of the things that I've found in recent times with some of the designs that we've been doing for projects that are handing off to clients as I have a developer that sub contracts for me and he goes yeah but we can put all of this stuff in but how's the end user going to use it what if we build this in the admin for the user and it was like fireworks going off so that my next project I'm using A half of this code and B also some of his ideas to go well I can I have this flexibility actually thinking not just the solves and somebody has mentioned you know the scratch is a niche but it also solves a problem thank you thank you for being brave enough to answer the question has anybody else who'd like to contribute to that sure so I got interested in usability which is kind of embracing users in a way back in 2008 I think and it's not an easy question because there's different users that have different needs but I think anything we can do to improve our products for end users and make it easier for them is going to increase adoption which helps feed more of us as devs I guess so that's probably at the end of the day one of the strongest motivations that I could think of for it being a good thing to do because I assume most of us earn our living from these products and I think you can tell with the push towards you know HTML5 and web standards and improving accessibility in Drupal you know it also helps those people who have cognitive physical etc impairments that make it harder and I think that's again helping make the world a better place which is karma for devs I don't know good karma so I think it's a noble goal it's a worthy goal and it would be awesome if we could magically make every developer care about the user experience but I guess we all have different paths that we've walked to get here so I don't know how to do that but I guess it's one of those things that we keep talking about as the more we keep talking about it five minutes, thanks Matt and certainly accessibility is a huge push in WordPress as well same with translation, huge conversations happening around all of that and great to have teams that are involved in pulling it all of that sort of stuff together I'm going to skip past that one because we've only got five more minutes and I was reminded about this this morning in one of Matt who is one of the founders of WordPress and one of his keynotes I think it was WordCamp Europe it may have been last year he talked about this idea of what he's called five for the future companies dedicating 5% of their people to do or to be working on something to do with core and he outlines that being security support forums documentation dev not just code testing and translation and so forth I wondered if you guys had a similar program or if you thought of your contribution happens within or without your kind of work experience now what Matt was talking about here was particularly there are a large number of companies now starting to grow and develop who are building their whole business model I guess on stuff that they're doing with WordPress there are a number of big agencies that are fully WordPress focused doing for WordPress VIP which is the kind of high end WordPress.com hosting for enterprise and so Matt's suggestion is is that if everybody gave 5% to the project that would really help the project and it would really help their businesses and I thought do you guys have anything similar are you interested in that kind of thing do you think it's valid or viable Brian, the mouthpiece for Dreffel this morning I can speak in the context of my company we not necessarily towards core all the time but every time we make a patch our whole development process means we have to contribute it back to dribble.org so if we have to make a patch against the module we have a make file which references the module and then any patches are in that make file so it's number one it's documented for the project owner so it's contributed back to dribble.org whether or not the module developer decides to incorporate that into the project or not so even if it's a a case specific patch we still put it on dribble.org so if they ever change their developers they can still have access to all of the code but I don't know as a percentage of time we obviously give back to the community through organising the events mentoring people at conferences I think the biggest problem like where a small company is only three of us and that puts a constraint on our earning potential that a much larger company can afford to give 5% of time because not every person in the organisation is going to do that necessarily but they have a larger pool of money coming in to allow diverting some of the funds toward that in truth be told we would probably give 100% of our time if we had a revenue stream to do it what I think is very useful and the D8 Accelerate I think Angie's left but is alluding towards that where there are companies who have the funds but don't necessarily have the skills internally or they make a living from using these products and they can contribute back by giving to that fund allows that to help the acceleration of Drupal it would be awesome if there was companies who could do that to other organisations who may have very strong skills in their company but not necessarily the infrastructure to organise a programme like that and I don't know how you would structure that but we've got several Drupal projects that we want to work on that we don't have the time at the moment and I'm trying to you know do up proposals to take to organisations that may be able to fund and have a use case for those organisations as well so to help them make sales cool, thank you thank you thank you very much I'm going to be here I'll be here for the rest of today so if you want to talk WordPress or community or want to talk open source I'm totally up for it and that would be great but thank you very much for having me, really appreciate it