Joomla! Community Magazine™

Have you ever thought that transfering disembodied data across the globe using lasers and electromagnetic fields to your thinking rock powered by lightning so that it conjures some scribblings on a piece of glass which make you vividly hallucinate my thoughts is nothing sort of magic? Well, folks, let's talk about the source of those hallucinations, what we call content.

Today I'd like to share with you what has happened in the last few months, actually years, behind the scenes of the Joomla project. I'm not talking about the politics or big decisions on the direction of the Content Management System (CMS), but about some of the work done to our infrastructure which is tucked away and nobody gets to see apart from special tours like today's article.

One of Joomla’s greatest strengths is its extensibility, and the thousands of listings in the Joomla Extensions Directory certainly prove that point. 

One of Joomla’s other great strengths is its flexibility—this is harder to see, because there are many ways to build a site even when given the same brief. 

I’m happy to introduce the Joomla Out of the Box challenge this month! The goal of this challenge is to showcase the many ways to build a site, using only Cassiopeia and the front end components that come installed with Joomla. 

Google's Universal Analytics (UA) has been about since 2006 but with it retiring next year it is a good time to look at alternatives and what might best suit your needs.

Nadja Lamisch fell in love with Joomla 2.5 when she was looking for a CMS to build larger websites with. She joined a Joomla User Group, attended and co-organized JoomlaDays and felt very welcome in the community. When she was considering ways of doing more, she decided to run for Treasurer in the Board of Directors of Open Source Matters, Joomla’s supporting organization - and got elected. Read all about Nadja’s plans and ambitions! 

If you are a long term Joomla user, you’ve probably noticed new features from time to time. Where do some of these features come from? Who develops them? Well, this is what the Joomla Enhancement Development Team is for! Team members often evolve from Google Summer of Code student to… read further and you will find out :) 

The Joomla Experience Team is a new working group (and hopefully soon, an official Production team) intended to replace the former JUX team, which has sadly been inactive since 2017.

She didn’t like Joomla when she first came across it. Learning a new system in the middle of a pandemic while studying something else already was not very high on her fun list. But after Louise Hawkins dove into the documentation, took some training, discovered the Joomla User Group London and got help and support from the community on Facebook, she became more and more enthusiastic. Today she is Team Leader of the Joomla Marketing Team. Pleasure to meet you, Louise Hawkins!

My association with Joomla has mostly been enjoyable: I’ve made some good friends… although I have my share of frenemies as well.  I’ve travelled the country and the world and I even have a photo memento of me giving Brian Teeman^* a smooch on the cheek at J & Beyond in 2013. But above all, I’ve learned so much from the almost-daily contact I have with Joomlers everywhere whether they’re first-time newbies or whether they’re hard-core web evangelists. I wouldn’t have missed it for quids.

What if there would be a completely free and open source, fully portable WAMP development stack, created with Joomla developers in mind? Guess what: there is! Two Joomlers are working on it. Troy Hall decided to create (or rather, fork) it, Jacob Waisner joined him in the project, and Bearsampp is now available for everyone to use. Find out what it is, who it is for and what you can do with it!

The Joomla User Groups Team is happy to announce the launching of the Joomla Virtual JUGs directory.

The JCM Team is proud to present you the August Issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

August is Pride Month in the Joomniverse! We’ve asked Joomlers to share the Joomla 4 sites they’re most proud of, and ended up with diversity at its best. In this single JCM article only, we discover a wide variety of sites that use Joomla: personal and blog websites, small business and corporate websites, sites for non-profit and governmental organizations and community websites. Check them out and get inspired!

We all have our personal reasons why we once started using Joomla to build web sites. Joomla Community Magazine asked on social media how people started using Joomla and here is a selection of their answers.

What is the average lifespan of a website? I have absolutely no idea. But I figured: with Joomla turning seventeen, surely there should be some Joomla websites out there that are just as old, or even older. So I put a call out, and I found three Joomlers that actually have or maintain an “ancient” website: Peter Martin, Randon Myles and Rachel Walraven. How did their site evolve? And what is the secret to keeping your site alive for so long?

In the series Meet the team, this month we have an interview with the Joomla Accessibility Team. Accessibility is one of the highlighted features of Joomla 4, and the team is still working on updating and improving Joomla and its properties in the accessibility area.

Attention all fellow Joomla volunteers: we are Joomla’s most precious jewels. Without us, the volunteers, Joomla wouldn’t be what it is now, and without us you wouldn’t even be reading this article. We matter. We are precious.

The idea was Benjamin Trenkle’s during the early covid lockdowns of Spring 2020: a cycle tour of Germany running from south to north. Him with, at the time, a dodgy knee and me having no bike!

The topic of how to write a blog is a big one as it encompasses many aspects: the niche, planning, where to write it and how, and once you have your blog growing, how to promote yourself as a blogger.

In a hotel conference room in Darmstadt, Germany, a small team of Joomla enthusiasts got to grips with Docusaurus, taming the beast to the advantage of the Joomla developer community. This neat package of software is probably the most important change in Joomla documentation for a long time, and with the added bonus of slaying the dreaded MediaWiki captcha once and for all!