Joomla! Community Magazine™

What’s in store for Joomla 4.4? JCM meets the Release Managers, Allon Moritz and Martin Kopp. Let’s find out who they are and what they like most about Joomla 4!

The CloudFest Hackathon is an annual event in Rust (Germany) that brings together developers, designers, and open source enthusiasts from around the world. They collaborate and innovate on various projects, aiming to create cutting-edge solutions that address different challenges in the world of web hosting and content management systems. Like last year, a team worked on a new core Joomla feature: a multidomain solution. In this interview, Elisa Foltyn and Timo Feuerstein tell us what happened. 

At the moment of writing (mid April 2023), Crystal Dionysopoulos has survived her first few weeks as President of the Board of Directors of Open Source Matters (the organisation that powers Joomla). We at the JCM are very curious about our new president: what is she like, what will she bring and how can we all help her move Joomla forward?

FOSS Backstage is an annual conference in Berlin that is all about the behind-the-scenes work at open source projects, from community management to leadership. Robert Deutz, Sigrid Gramlinger, Jules Weigel, and I were lucky to attend on March 13th and 14th on behalf of Joomla. We all learned a lot from the diverse and engaging sessions, all of which were recorded and are freely available. Here are some of my top takeaways from the two days of learning and networking!

If you are a movie buff then you will have recognised the title of this article as a quotation from the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. But like all great quotations, that everyone knows, it is never said in the movie. The actual line is "If they build it he will come".

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

In the last magazine article: Guiding you through Guided Tours, we looked at guided tours (available in Joomla 4.3) and walked through their use. We stopped at the point of creating a guided tour as an administrator and as a developer.
Now we will finish that journey so you can build your own!

There are events, people, that illustrate the international and building side of Joomla.
Olivier Buisard of Simplifyyourweb grew up in France but his career path brought him closer to Open Source Matters' headquarters. Since then, he has lived in New York, but still has ties to his home country.

If anyone knows from personal experience what it’s like to be on the Board of Directors of Open Source Matters (the organisation powering Joomla), it would be Luca Marzo. He recently started his seventh term as Secretary of the Board, elected by us, the people of Joomla. After six terms on the Board, is there still any fun left? And what makes a good Board? Read and find out!

[ this article is part of a series - see part 1 here ]

If you’re still using Joomla 3 you’ll no doubt have seen the message that: “Support for Joomla 3.10 ends on 17th August 2023” I was last in this situation with Joomla 2.5.28 and at the time I carefully documented my experience as it took a number of goes to update and included several quirks, such as turning off the “Remember Me” plugin and then copying library files once the update had been done. For me this was a painful process.

A safe space to ask any Joomla-related question, where shaming is not allowed. That’s Joomla Improvers, a Joomla channel on Mattermost.

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

The Joomla API is a very interesting topic because it is so powerful.

But there is much to tell so I propose to start a new series of articles.

Joomla is an incredibly powerful and versatile Content Management System (CMS). Most of us think of Joomla when it comes to build complex websites, directories, and e-commerce stores. But these applications are more in the Content Management world. What happens when we need to develop a different type of web application? In those cases, it's common to use custom development and build our projects from scratch.

Whenever Joomla gets picked as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) candidate there is a flurry of activity around several projects. In 2022 one of the projects put forward was Guided Tours. This is a project that has been tackled by several students over several years and each one has nudged closer to the finishing line, but never quite got there. That's why it's especially gratifying to see Guided Tours as the main feature of the Joomla 4.3 release. It's the culmination of a lot of teamwork and a great example of what can be achieved if you just keep at it.

You probably know how to organise your content with categories. But what if you want to be able to show content from multiple categories, based on something they have in common? That’s where tags can be useful. And the good part is: you can use this right out of the box, because it comes with the Joomla core.

At the Joomla Community Magazine, we love it when people write books about Joomla (and maybe even more when these people are our own team members!). In this month’s issue, Laura Gordon reviews Joomla! 4 Masterclass: A practitioner's guide to building rich and modern websites using the brand-new features of Joomla 4 by Luca Marzo.

Looking back, looking forward

This week I stumbled across a copy of a keynote presentation given by Paul Delbar at JoomlaDagen 2012 all about Joomla 5 (although he was a bit trendy and used the Roman Numeral V).

In the previous article, I looked at Matomo, what it is and what it does.
https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/february-2023/web-analytics-alternative-to-google-analytics-matomo

There were several pros and cons that we went through and the costs were made clear. In this follow up I will go through the resources that are available to use Matomo as either a self-hosting package or a cloud package.