Joomla! Community Magazine™

Looking back through history we can see those moments of inspiration and those ‘game-changing’ movements. We admire and respect the innovative leaders which blazed the trail and lead the way into the future. We admire them because we know it’s a difficult job. We admire them because at times they were scoffed and ridiculed their ideas were rejected and their sanity questioned. Yet they continued. They persevered and they saw what no one else saw. They saw the future. And they were overwhelmed with the burden to get us there.

What is the outlook for Joomla 3.4 and beyond? Shorter and targeted release cycles, improved stability, no more STS/LTS, solving the Bootstrap challenge, and decoupling core extensions. In a video interview, David Hurley shares plans for achieving a new, lighter, and more stable Joomla core without breaking backwards compatibility.

The once very popular Singleton design pattern has become an anti-pattern. From hero to outcast. Like a sportsman who was caught doping. What happened?

Walking the thin line between speed and accuracy... The developer life is not an easy one. Most would think the life of a developer is relatively safe and holds very little in the way of danger. I submit this is simply not the case. The daily routine of a developer involves a complex and oftentimes difficult routine which most will never see or understand. Quite similar to a tightrope walk. 

Last month the magazine editors asked me to stop writing the series of articles for non-technologists because they determined that the objective had been achieved. I undertook the following article considering a more techy audience. After talking to the Spanish magazine team about writing articles that facilitate developers’ access to classes which allow us to build on Joomla using Joomla, the idea for this article arose. So I will try to write for those programmers who already have some knowledge ... although perhaps not yet the depth of knowledge that they want, all that Joomla offers to make your work more comfortable.

In Joomla, JavaScript usage has been increasing over the past few years. Now it is becoming a required need to have a proper JavaScript dependency handling mechanism to maintain its JavaScript Code.

Of all the Joomla Extension types available, plugins are the simplest to implement, but can be the most powerful with regards to customising your Joomla! website. Built into Joomla! are a number of events that trigger the execution of plugins, which essentially allow us to highjack the standard Joomla! code or output and insert our own code.

Third in a series of articles on practical development. The advantages of dealing with your Project through an in Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as PHP Storm. Consult previous articles in this series.

The second in a series of articles on practical development, dealing with your working environment in developing for Joomla! Consult last month's introduction for what to expect.

Whether you are writing PHP code or styling a website with cascading style sheets (CSS), there are a range of tools which can make your life much easier and allow you to focus on writing good quality code quickly and efficiently. This "practical development" series of articles will focus on using PhpStorm as a development environment and will consider seven topics.