Quick questions Matt Baylor
Matt Baylor recently became the Team Manager at JED.
Hi Matt, congratulation being Team Manager at JED! Can you tell us about yourself?
Well, my worst attribute is talking about myself ;-) I started using Joomla around 2007 while trying to build a website for a personal project. I went to school for web design and started a small design business, Natural Selection Web Design LLC (http://nswd.co). I cater mainly to small businesses and start-ups.
I joined the JED Team almost 2 years ago. I felt making a living using Joomla the least I could do was give a little back by volunteering.
How many people are in the JED team?
Right now we have 12 members. Over the past few weeks I have added some of the most talented and passionate individuals the community has to offer. Without their hard work and dedication we wouldn't be able to maintain the current site, let alone make the changes and improvements that I have planned. I'm always looking for new volunteers to help out with the workload. You can volunteer here.
When an extension is submitted at JED and the JED team takes over, what is the overall procedure?
When an extension is submitted it goes into a pending queue. As editors have time to contribute, they screen the submission using the submission checklists. If everything checks out OK, it gets published. If there are any problems the editor will flag the appropriate errors for the user to correct. The average wait time for the initial screening can range from as little as a few hours to 21 days, all depending on volunteer availability.
JED now holds over 10k extensions, what’s the biggest challenges maintaining a directory this big?
Right now we're at 10,085 extensions but when we drop support for Joomla 1.5 that number will significantly drop until developers update their extensions to 2.5 and/or 3.x. Right now our biggest challenge and project is migrating to Joomla 2.5. It's quite an undertaking, and thanks to tools like GitHub all of the team members can easily contribute.
Another problem area is submissions with errors. On average there's about 175 submissions sitting with errors. It's a bit disheartening having to invest valuable time into checking a submission 2, 3 even 4 times because the user didn't follow the checklists the first time around.
Will we see any changes or new features at JED in the near future?
Short answer: Lots. Once we get onto 2.5 I have quite a few improvements on my to-do list. We plan to evaluate the extension that manages listings and either re-write from the ground up or write a completely new custom extension. The Review System is going to get an overhaul that has been long needed. We're currently working on consolidating all of the JED specific documentation into the support system knowledge base. The Terms of Service is going to get re-written at some point. We have the Enhanced Listings project that will eventually get incorporated. Categories and usability are going to get some attention as well. Those are just the bigger areas that I see a need for improvement.
