Community Magazine

Welcome to Joomla! in the Press/Media. You will find links and short descriptions of where you can read recent articles about Joomla! in the Press and Media.

Someone must have said something bad about Joomla! template clubs last month, because they certainly stepped it up a notch in February.

I wandered into the Joomla! community shortly after the fork of Mambo to Joomla! in 2005. I had no idea what Joomla! was. At the time, I was involved in a huge web-based enterprise project and wondered if something like Joomla! might be an alternative, or even compliment parts of an enterprise system. The commercial system we were building was really expensive. Joomla! on the other hand, had a lot of what the enterprise system didn't have right out of the box. I'd investigated other open source website systems and bulletin boards but when I stepped into the Joomla! community I knew I'd found something special.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

It's still early enough in the year to make some predictions about 2011: dedicated people continue to affirm their willingness to give back to the project, and the project leadership is collaborating in new ways to keep Joomla moving forward!

A Founder Member of Joomla! with an often quoted blog tag-line of 'agree or disagree - I don't care' we turn the table on Brian Teeman with a 5 minute interview, a format he successfully uses on his own award winning blog. From achieved childhood hopes he has become a 'Man of Joomla!', a counsellor, advisor and an advocate with a passion for fairness and our Joomla! Community.

Joomla! is a volunteer community. And, within that community, people come, people go, people stay. With each new arrival or departure, there are opportunities for change. Inspiration. A new direction, or a different way of looking at things. The changes may be subtle, or a total in-your-face-whammy. You, the User/Developer/Designer, may see it, or you may not. But know this... Change is inspiration, and, like the wind, it can go in many directions.

At the end of last year I was thinking what I could do to spread the word about the new Joomla! 1.6 and the result is the free Joomla! 1.6 - Beginner's Guide, that I have written. It has 174 pages and covers all the things which are important to know and a few others, too.

Matt Lipscomb is a member of the Community Leadership Team (CLT), Co-Manager of the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED) and the Joomla! Resources Directory (JRD). In his day job he is Creative Director for USA Freelancers, a Joomla! web design team.

In the space of five days in January, I found myself catapulted into Joomla! gatherings around the globe in some unexpected ways. All of them left me feeling grateful for this wide and wonderful community, and marveling at technological advances, as we all celebrated the launch of Joomla 1.6

Unless you've been stuck under a REALLY big snowdrift, hopefully you're aware that Joomla! 1.6 was released on January 10, 2011.  Over three years in development, this new version adds many important features, lays a new architectural foundation for future releases, and starts us down a new path of time based release cycles. Joomla! 1.6 marks the beginning of a new era for our project. Here is a story about how our community worked together to announce this new era to the world...

Here is an easy and fun way for you to share your feelings about Joomla! with the rest of the community: Simply write a haiku about Joomla! below in the comments area of this month's page. Be sure to check back here to read the haikus submitted by other members of the community. We will have a page for new haikus in every upcoming JCM issue.

On January 10, the Joomla! leadership and community celebrated the healthy arrival of version Joomla! 1.6, weighing in at a strapping 8MB. January has been a month of celebration, as a new era is born!

One of the biggest challenges facing Joomla! 1.6 is the lack of a clearly defined migration path to get from Joomla! 1.5 to 1.6. No More! With the brainchild of one Joomla! developer, and the willpower of the Joomla! community, the ability to easily move your site to Joomla! 1.6 with just a few simple clicks is becoming a reality! We caught up with that developer, Matias Aguirre, to get his take on the development of the jUpgrade component and the community efforts to make it a success...

Joomla!’s temporary off-line mode is a very handy option to temporarily take your site down while performing maintenance —e.g. updating the Joomla! core or an extension— and is even suggested by the official documentation for the unfortunate time that your site has been compromised. However, is this really off-line, or are there any pitfalls you should be aware of?

Welcome to Joomla! in the Press/Media. You will find links and short descriptions of where you can read recent articles about Joomla! in the Press and Media.

First off: no, I'm not a bonsai expert. In fact, it takes me a lot of effort to keep the one bonsai tree in my house (which was a gift) alive. Why I'm writing this article about the similarities between bonsai trees and Joomla! then? 

When I ask my school customers about Joomla! and how it helps them do their job, they all have the same answer — they say that what used to take them hours to accomplish before, gets done in minutes with Joomla! — from adding new pages, to creating new events, to managing documents, etc.

I promise you, this article doesn't have to do anything with religion. It talks about site security. The beast I am referring to, is unwittingly opening a back door to your site to potential hackers. You may not know it, but you could be a sitting duck. It all lies in the dark world of ownership, users, groups and permissions. This is a long article, but I promise you that you will learn things you would have never imagined. Let us shed some light to the mystery of the 777 number, and kill the evil beast!

A little while ago there was a need for a forms component for the Joomla! Community Magazine. Out of this discussion I started to think that it would be interesting to do a comparative study of forms components for Joomla!. In my initial research, I started out with a forms component I know best: ChronoForms. I have worked with other forms components, but I just keep coming back to ChronoForms. It is one of the first extensions I install on any given site I am working on. One of the reasons why I like Chronoforms is it's highly configurable and fairly easy to extend. One of the things I stumbled upon in my initial research was a book called, “ChronoForms 3.1 for Joomla! Site Cookbook, 80 recipes for building attractive and interactive Joomla! forms”.