I'm often asked if anyone works full time on Joomla!. Technically the answer is no as no one is paid to work on Joomla!. But if we were to apply the UK Working Times Directive on the maximum working week then the answer is yes. Around the time of the split many of us were working 30+ hours a week getting Joomla! up and running. [of course the same is just as true today]

So why did we do it and what effect did it have on our lives. Speaking personally I worked hard getting Joomla! up and running for many reasons and its hard to rank them, so in no specific order my motivations were:-
-To provide a free of cost, opensource  tool to create websites.
-To work with a team of like minded people to create something of benefit to someone other than myself.
-To have fun
-To satisfy my ego, by knowing that I had made a personal contribution, in whatever small way, to millions of websites around the world.
-To be part of something that was changing the way the web is used.

But of course all the hours of work, and the difficult decisions that had to be made, had their toll. As a result many of the 'founding fathers and mothers' are either no longer directly involved or are now contributing in a narrower role.

For me the pressure of personal, professional and Joomla! life became too much and something had to give way. Sadly this meant that I had to withdraw from a level of commitment to Joomla! that I could no longer maintain.

But life today within the project is very different to life just one year ago. One year ago the pressures on the team from all around were very great. There were so many issues to deal with from hosting, finance, legal, code direction and not least choosing a name, that its not surprising that the 'core' was very insular and protective.

Today so many of those issues are behind us and as a result the number of people directly involved in the project has grown to a level that we couldn't have dreamed of one year ago.

What were once private mailing lists for development, documentation and testing are now open. Access to upcoming code is readily available to all and new initiatives like developer blogs are regularly used.

Recent months have seen successful gatherings of Joomla! users throughout Europe with more planned.

Documentation for users, developers and designers is either available now or in final proof reading stages and not forgetting probably the biggest new contribution to the increased success of the project extensions.joomla.org.

And now we sit waiting for the 'glorious 12th' and the release of 1.5 beta. A day not when all the hard work that has gone into creating 1.5 ends but more a day when all of us can contribute in our own way by testing and providing feedback. So that together we can finally release a product that will storm the net.

For me its not the core code that excites me but the potential it provides. With 1.5 we have so much more than a CMS. Rather, thanks to the hard work of the development working group, its a CMS sitting on top of a fully featured php framework. I am confident that it won't be long before we see this framework exploited to its full potential with the release of applications that sit on top of the framework rather than being bolted into the CMS.

But the next year has even more in front of it than just 1.5. I truly believe that in the next year we will see even more sites created in Joomla! and that many of these will be following in the footsteps of world leading organisations like unric.org.

Joomla! in a short period of time has become part of the vocabulary of millions of people around the world (not bad for an invented word) and if I was to have one dream it would be that we could have a global gathering of Joomla! users, designers and developers in this our second year.