In April, Xen became a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and unveiled a new community site at xenproject.org. Xen Project leaders worked closely with CloudAccess.net in the development of their new online home, built using Joomla.
The Xen Project is the open source community of developers that have contributed virtualization technologies licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). In the last 10 years, the Xen Project has produced many cloud technologies and “is the leading open source virtualization platform that is powering some of the largest clouds in production today. Xen powers Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Public Cloud and many hosting services.” CloudAccess.net is one of the countless cloud-based companies that benefits from Xen technologies. Thousands of users launch free trials of the Joomla CMS through our platform every month and the Xen Hypervisor is at the center of it all. It's the critical component that provisions compute and allows for Joomla application virtualization.
When the Xen Project needed a new, more collaborative home on the web, project leaders ultimately decided to build using Joomla. Expanding on the reasoning behind selecting Joomla, Lars said that, “in a nutshell, the Joomla back-end is a lot easier to use and to get started with than Drupal. That makes it ideal for a community site where you want volunteers to be able to do contribute.” Lars also added that “Joomla is relatively intuitive when you need to figure out how to get stuff done.” Joomla in an open source CMS that powers millions of websites worldwide.
Mark Hinkle said that "CloudAccess.net is in the unique position of having a strong hosting presence combined with an intimate knowledge of the Joomla! CMS + Application Framework, developer ecosystem and the Joomla! open source community.” He further commented that “we chose CloudAccess.net for numerous projects because of their broad knowledge and their dedication to supporting the underlying open source community as well as their skill at developing interactive websites that foster participation from the users of those sites."
Lars, Mark and Russell Pavlicek, evangelist for the Xen Project, worked closely with CloudAccess.net founders Dominik Kucharski and Pawel Borowicz to develop xenproject.org by creating Photoshop drawings of the site. Once the Xen Project team approved the drawings, Dominik coded it in place. Originally wanting to develop using the recently released Joomla 3.0, the team decided to use the 2.5 version as some of the extensions needed were still in beta testing. With plans to upgrade to 3.0 within the next year, the site integrates several 3rd party Joomla extensions including JomSocial, EasyDiscuss, SobiPro, Mosets Tree, DocMan, AcyMailing, Akeeba Backup and All Video Share.
Gary Brooks commented that “we were very excited to work with Xen on this project. We obviously share similar open source values and we both contribute to open source collaborative communities. Without Xen, our company wouldn't exist. We’re defining what we think 'cloud' means, and Xen produces the technologies that drive our highly available, scalable applications. We are the prime example of what's possible with Xen, a poster child of sorts."
With a new community site in place and a new home with the Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, the Xen Project celebrated with a 10 year anniversary party. Not wanting to make too many changes at once, both xen.org and xenproject.org are active at this point. With many upcoming changes in the coming weeks, the Xen Project considers their new site to be in beta testing. According to Kurth, “the plan is to migrate the old Xen Project very quickly” to take advantage of “exciting new functionality.”