Joomla! Community Magazine™

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

Joomla has been fortunate to benefit from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and other events over the past few years. Often, from these projects Joomla's core features are improved, and the members of the teams that work on these features go on to become pillars of the community. But is it now time for us to think about launching our own program alongside these and bring stability to the cycle of development?

Joomla 5, released on October 17th, marks a significant milestone in CMS evolution. This latest version, two years in the making, elevates the Joomla experience with its unmatched security, swift performance, and stellar code quality. At the heart of this leap forward is Joomla's unwavering dedication to innovation, performance, and security, necessitating a match in its underlying database systems.

To misquote Jack Swigert, “Okay, Joomla... we've had a problem here.”

We have tried to address this problem over the years, and it continues to be a problem in our community.
Making Joomla a safe space for all has proved challenging; we still have members making others feel threatened and intimidated.
But we must not give up; all together, we will make Joomla a safe space for all.

What’s in store for Joomla 5.1? JCM meets Release Managers,  Martina Scholz and Luca Rachetti. Let's find out a little more about who they are and what to expect…

One of the big challenges in Joomla is we don’t have enough volunteers to do the work. Or rather: the volunteers we have are often overloaded with work, and no one is available to help new people find their way, so they don’t know what’s expected from them and just start working nevertheless. This is a vicious cycle we can’t seem to break out of. As a result, not every contribution gets the friendly reception it deserves. To put it mildly.

There's more to a website project than installing, templating, and populating a CMS like Joomla!

One of the most important aspects to be respected is UX (User Experience). This is an emerging humanities science that fascinates Jonathan Magoga, so much so that he has made it his specialty, with a strong focus on UX Strategy. 

Next in our Joomla User Group series is JUG Athens, Greece. Here the organizers do more than "just" organizing the JUG as you can read in this interview. So, let's visit Greece!

Get a brief overview of OSM happenings from the current board president.

It's been six months since Crystal Dionysopoulos started her term as President of Open Source Matters (the not-for-profit organization facilitating Joomla). Time for a mid-term evaluation: what's happening, and what's to expect in the coming months?

For many of us, making a promise is a strong moral engagement. For some of us, it's also linked to a musical souvenir since decades.

Since version 4.1 (and so also in 5.x series) Joomla introduced a very interesting new feature called "Scheduled Tasks".

User of Joomla, you probably know that Joomla is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is licensed under the GPL version 2 or later as are the extensions published in the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED).
But did you ask yourself about the main reasons for this choice and the impact on Joomla and its extensions?

Search is such an important part of a website especially when there is a large amount of content. It helps improve engagement, or dwell-time as it’s sometimes known. Most of all it makes the site user-friendly as it helps visitors find what they’re looking for.

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

The advent of Joomla 5 heralds a new era for web developers and site managers, as it promises a suite of enhancements, optimisations, and fixes that streamline website creation and management. As we delve into the new features and improvements, it's pivotal to appreciate the developmental strides and transformations from Joomla 4 to Joomla 5.

These are more than just code!

For the July 2023 issue I had written a Joomla Magazine article about my first experiences with Joomla 5.0alpha1. I started with an empty installation and tried out some features: Creating articles, installing and using extensions. Now we are in October 2023. The final release of Joomla 5.0.0 is out since October 17, 2023, as well as the “bridge release” Joomla 4.4.0. One day later, I had all my sites on J4.4.0 without significant difficulties.

My next goal was a reality check for Joomla 5.0.0!

We all know that volunteering is a challenging decision and time consuming. In the case of Joomla, it can also be very difficult for no tech people and for non native English speakers.

So you created your own Joomla extension, maybe for a client, maybe for general usage, and now you're wondering how to best manage it for the future. You will have to handle bugfixes, store it somehow, create releases and maybe improve it with new features. So how could we do this? There are several ways you can do this, but today I'd like to show you the one possible solution that works good for me.

“fyi now that the main joomla.org site is on j4. my next target is the magazine”. That was the first sentence of the very first direct message I ever got from George Wilson. Followed by a link, and “i've got a backup here that i'll be working on over the next few weeks. don't need anything from you either (for now). but just to make you aware so that when the moment comes it isn't a total surprise”.