Community Magazine

Adding AI to your Joomla! extensions no longer need to be complicated or tied to one provider. With the new Joomla! AI Framework, you can write your code once and let your users choose between OpenAI, Anthropic, or even local models with Ollama — all through the same interface. In this article, I’ll show you what the framework does, why it matters, and how you can start using it today.

Joomla’s Weblinks component is a handy tool for organizing links, but it needed a refresh to keep up with Joomla 5 standards and the upcoming Joomla 6. Through GSoC 2025, I introduced features like frontend dashboard for weblinks and a pre-configured cloud environment for testing and more. These updates let users handle their weblinks more efficiently and give developers a model for building their own extension. This article explores the changes and how they can save time for both site admins and developers.

It’s the big elephant in the room: Joomla lacks a reliable long term roadmap for it’s CMS product. Additions to new versions have been primarily driven by personal preferences of individual contributors and not by a long term strategy - and finally, it’s time for that issue to be solved. 

In order to do so, a group of people gathered in a rural village in southern Germany in early September to answer the big question: where should Joomla head to?

Joomla comes with a handy collection of commands that can be run from a terminal window which can possibly save time for busy site admins.

Moving your website from one CMS to another is often seen as a daunting task. For many site owners who start with WordPress but want the flexibility, power, and community of Joomla, the thought of re-creating every article, menu, and media file by hand can feel overwhelming.

Organising a Joomla event? Launching a new Joomla extension? Starting a business partnership with another Joomla company? If you have Joomla news that is timely, relevant and valuable, and you want to share it with the world, a press release might help shape the narrative. In this article you'll find 7 steps to make sure your message is clear, complete and credible.

Joomla Pizza Bugs and Fun is an event like no other - for people who are close to its heart or who are just regular users of the platform. It’s where code meets community, and where even the smallest bug fix can spark a wave of collaboration.

When we're busy with deadlines and to-do lists, it can be difficult to keep up with new technologies. CSS has evolved dramatically in recent years, and it's not always easy to keep up with the latest developments.

In this article (perhaps it will become a series), I want to focus on a change that makes code easier and more flexible to write, especially for multilingual websites.

Do you write how to's, tutorials or instructions for content managers or clients? Then this article is for you! Find out how Joomla can help you with that, and vice versa: how you can help Joomla.

Open source is a powerful reminder that collaboration often creates results far greater than the sum of their parts.

Volunteering with the Joomla project offers countless benefits: professional development, friendships with peers who understand your work, and business networking opportunities. For me, gratitude has always been central. I’m thankful for the contributions of so many—past, present, and future.

This Year We Celebrate Together 20years of Open Source Achievements

It is Joomla’s 20th Birthday, and I am utterly honoured to serve as Joomla’s President at this pivotal moment in our history. For this reason, I would like to express my enthusiasm for everything we have accomplished and share my optimism for the decades yet to come. With this in mind, let’s take a look back together to see how much we have achieved in these twenty years.  

Twenty years of development, twenty years of commitment, twenty years of working together: if we'd ask every Joomler to create a timeline of what they consider the highlights and milestones of Joomla's first two decades, no two timelines would be the same. Nevertheless we wanted to give it a try. If you think anything is missing, please use the comments section to tell us what it is and why it should be there! And we'd really love it if you share your personal Joomla highlights as well, you can also do that in the comments. But first, have a look at our impressive timeline!

Happy birthday to Joomla actually means: happy birthday to you, our community. To the Joomla users, developers, designers, hobbyists and professionals. To the occasional helping hands and the volunteers in it for the long haul. To the drag-and-droppers and the code poets. To the thinkers and the doers. Happy birthday, to us, from us. 

The Joomla Community Magazine wouldn’t be here without our authors, designers and tech volunteers. On Joomla’s twentieth anniversary, let's take a moment to reflect on the work of the many volunteers who have made the JCM happen over the years.

In a world of competitive everything, it is so nice to find that in certain areas collaboration is king... And one such area is the open-source world, not only because we all depend on each other (and not just for code dependencies 😉) but also because often a contributor to a project isn't just contributing to one open-source project but a few... And in talking about collaborations, while Joomla has a few ongoing endeavors, we have a particularly interesting one in the Open Web Alliance which Joomla helped co-found back in early 2024.

Great Scott! It's August 17th, 2025, and Joomla is turning 20! Time to fire up the DeLorean and take a wild ride through the spacetime continuum of open-source history…

I still clearly remember how different the internet looked about 20 years ago. Websites were mostly built using table layouts - at the time, there were hardly any other options for structuring content. Design trends like drop shadows, rounded corners, and bright colors dominated the visual style. Mobile devices weren't a consideration yet, and responsive design simply didn't exist. Usability played a very different role back then, and content maintenance was mostly a technical task reserved for developers. For editors, it was often a real challenge.

In the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, while floodwaters surged and communications failed, a different kind of rescue operation began online. Not by emergency responders - but by coders, designers, and open-source advocates from around the globe.

You might think Hollywood heartthrob Chris Pratt and the open-source content management system Joomla have absolutely nothing in common. One blasts aliens across galaxies; the other powers websites across the internet. But hold onto your mixtapes, because the universe is smaller (and nerdier) than you think.

Today, we celebrate Joomla's 20th birthday. For 20 years, Joomla has been the go-to solution for millions of users: accessible, safe, secure, fast, robust and 100% yours. 20 years is quite a milestone for a CMS that is powered by people only. Think about it: Joomla wouldn't exist without us, its community. Together we made it possible for people to create websites, earn a living and support themselves and the people around them. Joomla changes lives. Our community helps, empowers and encourages people to learn, share what they've learned and to grow. That is something we can all be proud of. Together we've made Joomla what it is now. Together we're creating a bright future for Joomla. Together we're Joomla.

This month, we present to you an extra festive issue with loads of birthday-themed articles. Enjoy the celebration!

Happy 20th Birthday to Joomla!