Joomla! Community Magazine™

Fiona Coulter

Towards the end of March, I had to share with the community that one of my collegues, sounding board and friends from JSphere had passed away after a long illness bravely fought (T4C) Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

I met Fiona who ran Spiral Scripts while working on the Vulnerable Extensions along with Bernard Toplak and the security forum. The extension that runs the VEL was written by her. Many people who worked with her expressed their sorrow and I have passed their condolences on to the family.

Shivam Rajput

As you may already know, Joomla participates in the 2021 edition of the Google Summer of Code. Enthusiastic students from all over the world get the opportunity to work with us on improving Joomla with exciting new features. Shivam Rajput is the perfect example of what can happen after you join GSoC: you can become a Joomla Volunteer and learn even more! Shivam started as a student of the Google Summer of Code. Today, he is a fundamental part of the team that coordinates Joomla participation in the GSoC. Let's get to know Shivam a little more!

Joomla Content Management System (CMS) is widespread on the internet due to its ease of use and popularity since it is the second-largest CMS downloaded over 110 million times. But, even though popular, Joomla and all other websites, apps, eCommerce sites, or other CMSs contain security risks. You cannot escape them but fortunately taking the right precautions from the start can ensure your site is protected.

GSOC team

The mission: Recruit about 20 mentors to help guide four students through four projects that will ideally be integrated into future releases of Joomla 4.

Join our team

In America, April is National Volunteer Month where we recognize and celebrate those who give of their time and talent to help others. As a volunteer-driven organization Joomla! would not exist without them/us/we, the volunteers that work hard to manage, build, create, enhance, document, translate, market, and so on.

The JCM Team is glad to present you the March issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

Back in May 2020 when I was writing about the exciting new features of Joomla 4, Workflow had just been merged into the first Beta version that was released a week later. Since then there’s been various improvements made during the beta phase, and with Joomla 4’s release fast approaching, it’s time to look more closely at the new Joomla workflow features.

There are two circles. One represents all the things that I care about. The other represents all the things over which I have control. The circle of things that I care about tends to be quite a bit larger than the one that I have control over. This is true of almost everyone.

With Joomla 4 on the horizon, extension developers are working hard to get their extensions compatible with this new major release. Nobody wants to be the developer of an extension that breaks their clients’ websites. So they are all removing outdated code and replacing it with code that is up to the standards of today (and tomorrow). In this issue, Jan Pavelka from Phoca gives us a little insight into how they work, and of course he answers the big question: will Phoca extensions be ready on time?

You probably know that Joomla 4, our next major Joomla release, is getting closer and closer. But what about your extensions? Will they be compatible with this upcoming major version, or will they break your website(s)? The best way to find out is to ask the extension developers! For our March issue, we interviewed Yiannis Christodoulou from WEB357, who is happy to say that most of their extensions are fully prepared for Joomla 4.

With Joomla 4 on the way, some extension developers are still working on the compatibility of their extensions. Others haven’t even started yet (guys, you really should at least have started by now). And others, like AcyMailing… well, if you use it, you may know this already: AcyMailing’s latest version (7) is fully compatible with Joomla 4. Alexandre Derocq from AcyMailing is more than happy to share his thoughts on this with us.

Meet a Joomler: Josean Telleria

After more than 15 years of building and maintaining a successful business mainly based on Joomla, Josean decided that the time had come to collaborate with the Joomla project. After attending the Forum for the future in January 2020, he joined the Marketing team.

In our Explore-the-Core-series, experienced Joomlers explain the basic features of Joomla. In this article Christiane Maier-Stadtherr dives deeper into menus, menu-items and the things you can do with menus.

When we come to writing software and contributing to a major Open Source project there is much to consider. And that's often the problem.

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.

Joomla! is not only a software platform, it is also a Worldwide Community of Volunteers. 

Continuing our series introducing new features you’ll find in Joomla 4, this month we look at the improved email template system that allows you to override system email messages, as well as creating HTML templates on your site.

I don't build many websites. Most of my work is in training and advising people to build their own websites. So when I do need to build a new website I get the opportunity to put my ideas into practice.

Over the last few months I have been working on producing https://www.learnjoomla4.com - a free video course to teach people how to build their first Joomla 4 website.

Joomla exists thanks to the dedication of its volunteers. In this article we would like to express our gratitude and respect to Harald Leithner who served for long time as Release Leader for the Joomla 3.9.x series. Harald has served the project in several capacities over the years, he was also the Production Department Coordinator in the 2019-20 term. But let's get to know in depth the daily job of the Release Leader, with a short interview directly to Harald.

As a Joomla user, you may wonder whether the Joomla! extensions and services you use will be compatible with the upcoming major version, Joomla 4. What better way to find out than asking the developers? For our February issue, we had the pleasure to interview Robert Deutz from BackupMonkey, a dashboard you can use to backup, update and maintain all your websites at once. And together with the guarantee that their service will be fully J4-ready, he also gives us a lot of useful tips for offering maintenance to our clients!