Joomla! Community Magazine™

So you’ve decided to join the Joomla Community, and maybe even dedicate some of your talent, skills to Joomla. Great! But now what? Where is everyone? Where do all these cool people meet? How to find a team that suits you, and how to join them? We’ve got you covered! Read all about the steps you can take to get settled in, and know: every step of the way, there’s someone who can help you.

While I have been a Joomla user, website builder and non-ending promoter since before Joomla was even called Joomla, this past Pizza, Bugs and Fun of February 24th, 2024 was the first time that I hosted a community event for and with the Joomla community.

Allon Moritz began by developing extensions that improved the use of Joomla and made them public. He also invested time in the Joomla development teams so that he could give back to the community what he had received from the content management system.

His experience of coding well is useful and worth asking how he feels about being an extension developer and a member of the core Joomla development group.

Wherever you will travel for holidays, for business, or for any other reason, there's probably a Joomla volunteer around.
Recently, I've been in Sweden and I've took this opportunity to meet Sarah Watz, a famous Joomla volunteer but also a well-known former OSM President.

Olivier Buisard is a man of many talents who loves code.

He entered the Joomla world as an extension developer, and then got involved in developing the Joomla core, where he continues to help the community with his knowledge. Today he tells us how he managed to contribute and how he combines the two activities. 

David Jardin is one of the people who are absolutely inseparable from Joomla.
In addition to his professional activity as a developer, he regularly contributes to checking the security of the CMS.
He's honoured to share his experience with us and explain why it's important to participate in the development of our magnificent tool.

To misquote Jack Swigert, “Okay, Joomla... we've had a problem here.”

We have tried to address this problem over the years, and it continues to be a problem in our community.
Making Joomla a safe space for all has proved challenging; we still have members making others feel threatened and intimidated.
But we must not give up; all together, we will make Joomla a safe space for all.

One of the big challenges in Joomla is we don’t have enough volunteers to do the work. Or rather: the volunteers we have are often overloaded with work, and no one is available to help new people find their way, so they don’t know what’s expected from them and just start working nevertheless. This is a vicious cycle we can’t seem to break out of. As a result, not every contribution gets the friendly reception it deserves. To put it mildly.

We all know that volunteering is a challenging decision and time consuming. In the case of Joomla, it can also be very difficult for no tech people and for non native English speakers.

“fyi now that the main joomla.org site is on j4. my next target is the magazine”. That was the first sentence of the very first direct message I ever got from George Wilson. Followed by a link, and “i've got a backup here that i'll be working on over the next few weeks. don't need anything from you either (for now). but just to make you aware so that when the moment comes it isn't a total surprise”.