Joomla! Community Magazine™

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

Starting a new initiative is always an adventure: will people turn up? Will it be a success? Sigrid Gramlinger, Joomla's Production Department Coordinator, started the New to Joomla sessions a couple of months ago, to welcome new people and help them find their way in the Joomla Community. How is this going, and how can you join? Read all about it!

14th October 2025 feels like a lifetime away at the moment, but it's all the time we have left to get Joomla 6 planned, built and released.
I'm in my 50s - just - and the planets have aligned to have a little joke. Gary Barclay and I will be releasing the first Alpha on Joomla 6 on Tuesday the 15th of April 2025… Not my planning, but it happens to be Joomla London User Group that night as it's the third Tuesday of the month, and my 60th Birthday! 

So yes: dates do have some meaning, some very personal.

The process of migrating a Joomla website can sometimes present non-trivial challenges for users. If your site is built using standard components, the migration process is typically straightforward and even sometimes a child's play.

There's a famous story about Harald MacMillan, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. When asked by a journalist, "What do you fear the most in politics or what could most easily derail your government's agenda?" He supposedly replied:

"Events, dear boy, events."

Indeed, events can be fraught with unseen dangers when planning. Let's explore the key considerations to make your Joomla event truly welcoming for all.

A gorgeous banner for your category blog, easy to adjust and maintain by the content manager of the site - surely you must need an extension for that? Nope. Not in Joomla. You don’t even have to be Super Coder to achieve this! Read all about the power of custom fields to style your categories.

Are you looking for a straightforward way to shorten URLs on your website? If you’re running an Apache server, you’re in luck – you already have everything you need. Shortening URLs not only makes them easier to remember and share, but it also provides a cleaner, more professional look. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to set up a simple URL shortener using Apache’s `.htaccess` file.

You probably know Joomla is THE tool for creating websites, because it's really complete straigth out of the box. If you need a little more, you could use one of the thousands of extensions available in the Joomla Extensions Directory... or create your own. In this series, Herman Peeren takes us through the options.

Tassos is a Greek first name which, thanks to the hard work of a Joomla user, has become a well-known brand of extensions in the community.
Tassos Marinos now leads a company which provides a number of useful extensions ( some say essential ) in free or pro versions, and always with the same desire to be useful to Joomla users.
Let's take a look at the origins of this project, and find out who the man behind the developer is.

Sorry, there was a problem we could not recover from.

The server returned a "500 - Whoops, looks like something went wrong."

Gee, thanks, Joomla. I can see that. My site isn't working. Want to give me any further information so I can fix the darned thing?

It's all just dreadfully unhelpful. Not only that, but it's a big ugly red screen. It's not even styled like my site any more. What have I done? Have I lost everything? Is all my work gone? Have I been hacked? Perhaps I shouldn't have pressed that button?

And I haven't got a clue how to solve it or what is wrong.

In this third episode of the series about templates and frameworks for Joomla, Emmanuel Lemor shows us three popular frameworks: Sparky, Astroid and T4.

I’ve been unconsciously making customisations for clients in the backend of Joomla for a while. Some of the changes have been subtle. I’ll start with those, using the Atum Administrator Template in Joomla 5. United Colours First off I like to...

We'll do it again, - mark the date!

Joomla! 5.2 is coming closer and we will do our beloved Pizza, Bugs & Fun event like the last time. Mark your calendars for August 24th, 2024 to get your pizza and help Joomla! to get release ready. Whether you're a seasoned Joomla! enthusiast or new to the scene, PBF 2024.2 offers a unique opportunity to make a real difference while enjoying some fun and free pizza.

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

Are you a developer who needs to know when you can expect deprecated old functions, an administrator who may have new features to gem up on, or perhaps just nosy and wants to know when the next release is due? Then read on and get the inside knowledge.

There is a place and a time for everything. The current trend is to use Generative AI and LLM (large language models) for everything, but we're not there yet. Although technically inaccurate I will refer to this as AI throughout this article.

In a world where digital landscapes are ever-evolving, it's easy to take the thriving communities within them for granted. But what happens when we neglect the very foundations that sustain us? Just as the once-abundant passenger pigeons vanished from our skies, the vibrant Joomla community risks fading into obscurity without our collective vigilance and support. As I shared at JoomlaDays NL 2024, the story of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, is a powerful reminder of our shared responsibility. Every one of us can play a crucial role in ensuring Joomla’s enduring success.

Exciting News for Joomla Volunteers!

The wait is over, and I am thrilled to announce that Holopin is ready to launch! If you've been contributing to the Joomla Project in 2024, your efforts are about to be recognised in a fun and meaningful way. Instructions on how to claim your digital badge will be winging their way to you ASAP.

Over the last few weeks I have been rebuilding a joomla website that was built with a pagebuilder using just core Joomla and the core Cassiopeia template. This wasn't for a client, it was just as an exercise to satisfy my own belief that you don't need a pagebuilder.

Finally, after waiting for a year we could enjoy another JoomlaDay in the Netherlands! We had online meetings for a few months, and got our program set, and our visitors and presenters were back!