Joomla! Community Magazine™

Joomla was one of the winners of the CloudFest Hackaton with its TUF Project.

Elisa Foltyn shared with our readers some notes about the hackaton initiative.

Last month, I've read the awesome Astrid's blog post about what it means to be part of a global community, specifically the Joomla community. Being part of a global community is a huge topic and I'm not sure to have the answer, but I will do my very best to share my point of view in echo to Astrid's one ;)

Do you have another point of view after reading? Don't hesitate to write and post it next month in echo to Astrid's and mine!

I recently had an interesting conversation with my daughter. She couldn't believe I grew up in a house without a telephone. We got a phone when I was 13 years old. But the reason for getting it was primarily to keep in touch with my grandma. Just calling a friend was expensive at that time. Who you spent your free time with was determined by who lived nearby. Today, I enjoy not limiting my activities primarily to people in my local area. On the Internet, I can easily communicate with people who share my interests.

I am excited to announce some big news for Joomla Stack Exchange (JSE) - the most advanced platform for sharing knowledge and support for Joomla users. Before I do, let me tell you about my Joomla "origin story" so that you understand why I'm so thrilled.

On April 23 and 24, our ad hoc team* pulled off a JoomlaDay like no other, despite pandemic restrictions on travel and social gathering.

When Abhishek Das was looking for a more dynamic way to manage his blog website, he tried several content management systems. He chose Joomla because of its flexibility. Abhishek wasn’t trained as a web developer (he studied mechanical engineering), but after his first website, he started developing extensions nevertheless and learned programming during the process.

Steven Trooster’s first Joomla website was a festival site. The main challenges: an event calendar, a registration form and a mailing list. And on top of it all, the site had to be multilingual. Steven was experienced in building sites using Dreamweaver and other tools, but he hardly used a content management system before (except for a short fling with Typo3). How did he learn? With the help of the community!

From coders to content managers and from designers to developers: everyone in our community has had a starting point. And we all learn in different ways. Dénes Székely, for instance, started out as a programmer, created his first websites by using raw HTML and Javascript and discovered Mambo when he was looking for a way to manage a large, multilingual website.

We all learn in different ways. Some of us learn by following written step-by-step instructions with or without screenshots, some by watching tutorial videos, some by asking others, and some by clicking around to see what happens. For Julie Steffers, it was a bit of ‘all of the above’. When she needed to create an intranet website, she started out by launching a website on launch.joomla.org, the platform that enables you to build fully functional Joomla websites and experience how Joomla works (for free!). And she learned a lot along the way.

Eoin Oliver can’t really remember when he made his first Joomla website, but he does remember that it was a very cool one, and how amazed he was to have professional software to build it with. He played around with several different systems before he decided to go with Joomla.