Joomla! Community Magazine™

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.

The oldest and most prestigious university in the United States is Harvard University. This autumn, it has expanded its offerings to include a class on content management systems—and half the session will be devoted to teaching Joomla! to the students enrolled.

The Games of the XXX Olympiad are underway in London, United Kingdom. They're powered by the world's best athletes, years of training and a lot of muscle. It turns out that a lot of the Olympics are also powered by Joomla! websites.

The Joomla! team brings together many great Joomla! users and developers, which makes Joomla!, in general, and the Joomla! community, in particular, growing and maturing. Do you feel good about some area about Joomla!, have enthusiasm and especially believe in yourself? Do you want to contribute your ability to the Joomla! team but don't know how to do that? In this article I will reveal six ways for you to do just that. Let's check out what they are.

This year I was honoured to represent the Joomla! project with Paul Orwig at the Community Leadership Summit 2012, the meeting place for community managers and leaders from all around the world that took place in Portland, Oregon (United States) on the 14th and 15th of July.

In this article we want to look under the hood of the Joomla template system to understand the basics. Creating a template from scratch is not rocket science. When you are building a website you always need to decide whether it is better to create a template on your own or to buy one. Besides of these two options you can also modify an existing template. To be able to make a useful decision you need to understand the process of creating a Joomla template.

This is the second part of my secure website which is translated from the Hebrew guide. The first part was more basic and targeted beginners. This part is more advanced, with details and explanations. 

What can you do to start automated unit testing when you're writing extensions for a complex existing system like Joomla? It's not always easy, but with a few simple changes you can get started. Once you've started, remember the first rule, "Break all Dependencies!" Using some special capabilities built into PHPUnit, along with some of these simple techniques and patterns, you can get to the land of testability.

If your client has more than one person maintaining the site, you should consider providing role-based ACL. What is "role-based" ACL and why should you use it instead of the 1.5 approach of ACL?

Each and every day you likely have hundreds or thousands of visitors to your website. If you've done your proper content/promotional offers, call to actions and landing pages there's a chance that you will convert between 1 to 4 percent of these visitors into a lead. But how can you effectively convert these leads into sales? One critical tool used to boost lead conversions are lead nurturing campaigns. After reading this article you will understand what a lead nurturing campaign is and how they can boost your lead conversion rates and in-turn boost sales.

A detailed update for Joomla's Google Summer of Code Program. With the summer winding down, find out what the students have been up to over the last few months. Learn about their project's progress and how you can get involved!

Joomla 3.0 is due out next month, and if you're thinking "oh no, another migration situation!", don't get your feathers all ruffled yet. If you're on Joomla 2.5 you'll be absolutely fine staying where you are, probably until 2014.

July was a month for upgrades and migrations. Lots of new improvements under the hood - check them out!

A lot of people hear Joomla and say, "What?...what is Joomla?", but when people hear Wordpress they say, "Oh, the blogging software?". It is a common practice to use something like Wordpress when trying to build a website. Why not, there are tons of themes and plugins out there and Joomla seems hard, difficult, and too complex. Yet, when you sit down and actually use Joomla and learn all of its eloquent intricacies, there is no turning back.

Javier Gomez and I had the privilege to represent the Joomla! project at this year's Community Leadership Summit in Portland, Oregon on July 14 and 15. I had a great time at this conference last year, and I was excited to have the opportunity to return. This year's conference was better for me than last year's, and I am happy to share a few thoughts here about my experience.

Every day we are faced with making thousands of decisions. Some decisions are as simple as what to eat for breakfast while others can be as difficult as deciding whether or not it’s time to add another employee into the mix. But in the end what’s important is that you make the RIGHT decisions. Making the right decisions isn’t always easy and making poor decisions is a sure fire way to lose clients and hurt your company’s reputation. Below we outline five common ethical missteps and how these problems should be handled.

Cape Town, Chicago and Lomé are the cities where you will find locally organized JoomlaDay events in August.

In the summer of 2011, Virya Technologies had reached a point where the company needed to expand due to the volume of work, but also wanted to invest in the community and provide an opportunity for a young person to gain employment, training, and involvement in Open Source technologies.

As web developers our projects are complex and Project Management Systems (PMS) are essential to our success. A great PMS has many benefits but if you're using one that is under powered or isn't a good fit you can really be hindering your team's productivity and workflow. Modern PMS' offer more complete business solutions bundling CRM, invoicing, time tracking and more. Below we will explore some of today's best PMS' so you can determine which would be the best fit for your organization.

Joomla! We have a problem! It is accepted that the documentation of Joomla! could be improved. We need not dwell on the shortcomings. We would prefer to write about our plan for a new approach and, as we describe the benefits, lightly touch on those difficulties which the proposal addresses.