Community Magazine

Open source does not work by accident. It works because people show up. We often describe that effort as "giving back". It’s a useful idea, but it may also be limiting how we think about contribution.

If you follow my writings, you probably know that I try to use as few extensions as possible. Not because I don’t like extensions, but because I like to keep the websites I create as easy to maintain as possible. There are many cases where extensions absolutely make sense: events calendars, big image galleries, file downloads, etc. In other cases I’m sure I can handle the request with Joomla core and some overrides, because Joomla is a very powerful system.

With Joomla 6.1 now available, attention turns to what comes next. Joomla 6.2 is scheduled for release on 13 October 2026, and at the helm are two release managers who bring very different backgrounds to the role. This month we meet Charvi Mehra, whose journey into Joomla began not through code but through a university semester project in Delhi. In just four years she has gone from newcomer to GSoC contributor, GSoC mentor, Bug Squad and CMS Release Team member, and now release manager. She co-manages the 6.2 release with Martin Kopp, whom we will meet next month.

Are you a company, an agency, an extension developer, a template provider, or an enthusiast? Are you wondering what sponsorship is and whether it applies to you? Then let's discover together why you shouldn't miss this opportunity, whatever your goals and resources.

In Joomla 6.1, custom fields just got significantly more flexible. Until now, the Media custom field type only let you select images but thanks to a core enhancement in Joomla 6.1, you now have dedicated field types for audio, video, and documents in addition to images. (github)

When I write for the Joomla Community Magazine, I usually do so with my " I'm a regular Joomla user, integrator, website builder " hat/mindset... but I also have other hats, like being a volunteer for the project in different teams, and at least one other hat, that of having the honor of being on the OSM Board as Vice-President.

In just a few short weeks, a disparate group of Joomla volunteers across multiple disciplines will convene in Paris for a two day Outreach Sprint. 

The teams in Joomla’s Operations Department are our enablers. They’re the quiet and unobtrusive teams, working silently in the background on everything the other teams need to get their jobs done. Carlos Cámara, coordinator of this department (and just elected for his third term), tells us what his department does and why he likes it so much.

This is the start of a series of articles about building custom plugins. We will start with some general information about plugins and creating them. In subsequent episodes of this series we will take a closer look at specific plugin types and their peculiarities.

Joomla is well known for its flexibility. Its menu system is powerful, its module architecture solid, and in the hands of experienced developers it can scale from simple websites to complex platforms. But anyone who has worked extensively with multi-level menus and multiple modules has likely run into a recurring frustration: the lack of module inheritance. Joomla allows modules to be assigned to specific menu items, giving precise control over what appears on each page. That level of control is a strength, but as a site grows, it can also become a maintenance burden.

Since 2023, Sigrid Gramlinger has been the Coordinator of Joomla's Production Department. She just got re-elected for another term. In this interview, Sigrid tells us more about her department, the responsibilities, the achievements and the strategy for the future.

The other day, I ran into a bug : an extension that threw up an error message as mysterious as it was frustrating. My first reaction was to copy and paste the message into my browser and start searching. And there, as is often the case with Joomla, it was a foreign forum that gave me the clue (in my case the Dutch one). Not the official documentation, not a YouTube tutorial, not a LinkedIn post: a discussion thread started by a stranger, somewhere in the world, who had encountered the exact same problem before me.