Community Magazine

Developing a mobile Joomla website for each of your clients is not only critical to the success of that client’s goals but also an excellent source of additional revenue. As a development firm, it is your job to educate your clients on the critical importance in having a mobile website to achieve their future goals. In this post we will be looking at why your clients need a mobile Joomla site and how you can use this information to complete the sale.

TP2 is the only extension that gives you the ability to see all of your module positions in site preview and use a drag-n-drop interface for adding and managing site modules in any position.

In the age of ‘always on’ connections, having a web presence is more important than ever. In response, there are a proliferation of web page design programs that promise good web pages with little or no web programming experience. Joomla does not necessarily play in this space, but how feasible is it to construct web sites using Joomla with little or no programming experience? After all, on first inspection, the number of extensions available to the Joomla community should make this a piece of cake, right? This article is a first hand experience of a non programming newbie to Joomla constructing a Portal for multi-national usage.

Many business owners and developers have often toyed with the notion of releasing a commercial extension. With Joomla!'s large community and expansive reach, releasing a product can be a great source of revenue and exposure. All too often, though, many key details are overlooked.

In order to help business owners avoid this common mistake, I recently sat down with Joomla! Extension Directory editor and Anything-Digital Founder and CEO Vic Drover who helped identify the most important aspects to consider when releasing a commercial extension.

Setting an hourly rate – a topic everyone wants to understand but doesn’t necessarily want to discuss. Too often business owners don’t know how to properly set hourly rates and resort to methods such as guessing or copying a competitor’s rates. However, following these ill-advised procedures can often leave you not charging enough for your services and scared to ask for proper compensation. While there are many strategies for determining your hourly rate, this article breaks down the most widely used approach.

Den Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner's Guide gibt es nun auch in einer deutschen Übersetzung.

Il Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner's Guide ora anche in traduzione italiana.

When the Joomla Community Magazine launched in July 2010, the Editor's introduction for that first issue included a metaphor for the new JCM and team, which was that of ship built by a crew who longed for the sea. Now, twenty one months later, I am stepping aside from the JCM to better focus on my new role as President of Open Source Matters. I want to share some closing thoughts about the JCM and team, along with a new metaphor for what I think they represent for our project and our community.

2012 is now well underway, and for the month of March 2012, there's four JoomlaDay events to look forward to. As someone who lives at the Southern tip of Africa, I'm happy to see two events from African countries among these! Here's the roundup for this month:

Volunteering to help with Joomla! is fun! Check here for listings of current volunteer openings throughout the Joomla! project that have been posted in the "Help wanted in the community” forum.

Spring is nearly here and that can mean only one thing — it’s J!OSCAR season! At J and Beyond — the developer conference held annually in Europe — the Joomla Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition awards are given to the very best talent in the Joomla community. Today I am proud to announce that nominations for the 2012 J!OSCARs are now open and I encourage you all visit the J and Beyond web site to complete the nomination form.

The German <a href="http://www.screengui.de">Screenguide Magazine</a> asked me to respond to 10 Joomla! prejudices. Here my answers:

This is really true. I have been observing several overseas companies entering into the Japanese Joomla market, but they only last for a year or so. The reason is, they do not follow "When in Rome, do as the Romans!" Please look at the design taste and language. Building Joomla sites may be the same, but there are always some native ingredients included and involved. The overseas Joomla firms do not perceive these native elements.

In February 2010 Google adopted a new strategy that the company's focus is now more on smartphones than on desktops. Eric Schmidt summed this up with a new motto: "Mobile First". Google developers started to create versions of new services for smartphones before creating ones to run on PCs. At that time the global smartphone penetration reached a average of 15% (2009). Two years later, we talk about a global smartphone penetration of 30% (2011). Only in 2011, nearly 500 millions smartphones were shipped.

Now that you have a grasp on the terminology of ACL, let's implement a simple system where different users see different content on a website. To follow along with this example, you should be working with Joomla 1.7 or higher.

Clients grumble too often about a hard-to-use CMS.  The problem, often, is delivering to clients edit screens that are unchanged from how they come out-of-the-box.  We can do better. In this example we’ll be tailoring a complex edit screen into something streamlined for a particular client.  The technique shown here can be applied to any extension and for any client with specific needs.

With the Joomla! 2.5 release, a new search component has been included to improve the search engine in Joomla! sites. Based on JXtended's Finder, Smart Search is quite the powerful tool and can be used to improve search results and show the user exactly what they want. Out of the box, Smart Search will work for most core data, but third party developers will have to create their own Finder plugins to interact with Smart Search. Not to worry, I'll help you get started with that now!

Joomla! 3.0 is scheduled to be released in September 2012. It will include major new core features built on top of our rapidly advancing framework. But in order to apply that power effectively, everything has to be tied together in a simple and intuitive way that will result in a great user experience (UX). In this interview with longtime community contributor and Joomla! User Experience team member Kyle Ledbetter, you'll learn about his UX vision for Joomla! 3.0 and the high level roadmap for how we will get there.

With the new 2.5 release comfortably settling in and the old 1.7 one almost at the end of its life, many site builders and users are asking what they should be doing next and what decisions they should be making regarding the update and maintenance of their websites. I was able to speak with quite a few Joomla! folks on the subject and got great feedback that I would like to share below.