By Crystal Dionysopoulos on 2022-08-22 14:20 in Joomla Experience Team

Details:

  • Scheduled duration: 60min
  • Actual Duration: 1hr 50min
  • Participants: Crystal Dionysopoulos, Elisa Foltyn, Angie Radke, Benjamin Trenkle (PLT Liaison), Harald Leithner (liaison)
  • Absent: Robert Deutz (CMS Maintenance Liaison)

Agenda Items & Minutes

Topics:

  1. Scope and purpose of JXT

    1. Benjamin wishlist:

      1. Improve release process, GitHub template, have different approvals for Pull Requests Ie - a11y and JXT should review releases before it goes to RTC so that releases don’t break (daily business sort of thing)

      2. Code owner for certain files

      3. Future development of joomla - front/back end templates, defining roadmap of next steps and future guidelines, need to be involved

      4. Teaching people - documentation, 3PDs, joomla best practices, developer experience

    2. Elisa wishlist:

      1. If you are logical, you don’t need documentation - it should be available but not necessary

      2. Clean up GH issues and existing bugs before thinking of new things

      3. Review PRs before merging to ensure that nothing breaks

      4. It has to work before you can improve the experience

      5. Consistently use language overrides, manage language overrides, etc, works totally differently from rest of Joomla

    3. Harald wishlist:

      1. Style guide - backend - eg, where is the primary button located? Where is the cancel button located? Colors, modals, input fields, etc – Consistent experience. When should each element be used? 

    4. Angie wishlist:

      1. Best practices, techniques, practical considerations are all good - but we need to look at the bigger picture too

      2. Joomla has gone from a small system to a big system that is no longer easy to use because it’s grown organically. But we need to ensure that it’s easy for people of all backgrounds to use and get involved

      3. User testing, user research, back up decisions with research

      4. Joomla is not easy anymore.

    5. Crystal: 

      1. Balance between current practicalities and big picture thinking

      2. Definitely need to clean up current issues and bugs

      3. Foundational role-based personas - to be used as a base for each team to build on, or for 3PDs to build on

      4. Map Joomla ecosystem - what plays into a persona’s experience, how much influence do we have over it at each point of the ecosystem

      5. Map CMS functionality from the perspective of the interface, so that you can test PRs and releases in more targeted ways (long term goal)

 


 

Decisions Made

  1. Scope of JXT:

    1. Damage Control and Quality Assurance: Bring attention to current bugs and issues to improve the experience in the CMS as it exists now, review PRs when necessary or requested. Track common issues and questions to help discover usability bugs.

    2. Guidance and Best Practices: Produce research-based strategy and documentation to help guide other teams with their decisions in order to ensure a consistent Joomla experience across the ecosystem as a whole.

    3. Visionary, Long Term Thinking: Assist with roadmaps and goals for future releases and decisions, in order to ensure the sustainable and consistent growth of the CMS and Joomla Ecosystem.

  2. Short term goals:

    1. Go through old issues and get developers to look at them to either fix or close, record and track usability issues for research

      1. Set up research repository to track feedback

    2. Define role-based personas

    3. Basic mapping of joomla ecosystem

    4. Provide guidance for the new joomla.org template project

    5. Get team official

  3. Long term goals: TBD

    1. Basic CSS Framework for very basic, plain styling of Casseiopeia template? To be used as a starting point for template developers so they don’t have to fight with Bootstrap if they don’t want to

Next Steps

  1. Get another 2-3 reliable team members so the team can be official

  2. Answer question: Under what conditions should JXT be auto-tagged to review PRs? Who will be tagged?

  3. Set up research repository to track user feedback across channels (Crystal)

  4. Go through old issues and get developers to look at them to either fix or close, record and track usability issues for research

  5. Define foundational role-based personas

  6. Basic mapping of joomla ecosystem

  7. One off meeting about front end templates to get contributors for a sub-team to implement the different css framework templates