Joomla! Community Magazine™

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

This month we celebrate the 19th birthday of Joomla!

Wait - what? A content management system changing lives? Surely that can’t be a thing? Well, turns out it is. Like every other free and open source software, Joomla makes it possible for millions of people worldwide to change their life for the better. So: free, yes, but priceless in what it brings to us. JCM asked 19 people just one simple question: how did Joomla change your life? Read their inspiring stories!

Wonderful news! At the moment of writing, it's Joomla’s (19th) birthday. 

But what is Joomla, and what are we celebrating? 

Joomla is a content management system (CMS) as we all know. However, beyond this, Joomla is all the people who support it. A huge community of volunteers who are there to build, develop, extend, teach, communicate, advocate, and so much more. 

For the first time since getting involved with Joomla I’m actually excited about the state of Joomla documentation for extension developers!

In the past Joomla hasn’t had the best reputation for developer documentation, but for me the Joomla Manual is a big step forward. I think it’s important for the Joomla project to view extension developers as “customers” and make it easy for them to find all the good stuff that there is in Joomla.

I joined the small team contributing to the manual about a year ago, and it’s been very satisfying to see the Manual taking shape. We’re not there yet, but definitely on the right track.

I assume we all make assumptions ?, and often there’s no harm in this at all. But when it comes to written communication, which happens a lot in our community (think GitHub and Mattermost) things can easily go pear shaped when assumptions are made. Assumptions going rogue can lead to anger, sleepless nights, teams falling apart, volunteers rage quitting, work not being done and a ruined reputation (for the volunteer(s) involved and for Joomla). How does this happen, and how can we prevent it from happening?

A birthday is always a time for celebration, but also an excellent opportunity to remember the years gone by.

For 19 years, Joomla has changed. A LOT. These changes were decided and implemented by volunteers - women and men - who gave their time for this project.

If you’ve been building websites for some time you may just reach for your favourite CMS without thinking much about why you use it. However you might need to give some justification to a client, especially one with some knowledge of website building tools, as to why Joomla 5 is the best CMS for their new site.

A few days are left for the next episode of Joomla’s legendary Pizza, Bugs & Fun 2024.2 event. So prepare your GitHub account or check your documentation credentials, because you’ll need this. With Joomla 5.2 coming, there is a lot to do. Be ready on 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.

Everything I am going to show here could have been done by creating my own template but as I wanted to ensure that it would be future proof I have done it with CSS, a tiny bit of javascript, and existing Cassiopeia template options. 

You’ve probably heard of Mastodon, the open source alternative to X. Mastodon consists of thousands of independent servers, all together these servers form a social network Big Tech has nothing to do with. Open Source! That’s right up our alley, so of course Joomla has its own Mastodon server, joomla.social. JCM interviews Harald Leithner, who played a big part in making this happen. 

A wise person once said: “The quality of software is measured by the quality of its documentation”. OK I just made this up, but it could very well be said by a wise person, because it makes sense. Where does Joomla stand, documentation-wise? And how can you help Joomla to get the documentation it deserves? We asked Dieter Ziller, Team Leader of Joomla's Documentation Team.

In the second episode of our building-tools adventure we'll delve deeper into our event schedule example and explore how to implement it using two Joomla application builders — Seblod and Fabrik. We'll not yet create a full component, instead we’ll embed our application within these extensions. By doing so we will also get a better understanding of the requirements for the component we want to build in subsequent articles of the series.

Yannick Gaultier isn't an SEO consultant, but it's an area he loves and he's one of the most knowledgeable people in the Joomla world.

The Future is bright for Joomla 5 (and beyond)…

EPISODE IV: UIKit, Gavern, and Gantry Frameworks

As we have seen in the last 3 episodes in this series, you have options in building a Joomla 5.x website: