Joomla! Community Magazine™

As you all know – Joomla!'s page loading speed is not one of the main advantages of the system. Of course, there is some advice you could follow and there are two very important things that needs to be done:

Yes, I have heard the rumors. Joomla! 1.6 is out. So why review a book on 1.5? My main two reasons are: 1.) If you want a “production” site working now with a stable version of Joomla! and stable versions of the extensions used. 2.) This book is a great starting point to get into Joomla!. Yes, it is called “Joomla! 1.5 Site Blueprints”, and even author Timi Ogunjobi states that this book is not an introduction to Joomla!, nor an in-depth manual for using Joomla!; but... it's the book I wish I had picked up when I first got started with Joomla!.

Grab your shillelaghs and shamrocks... and beguile us with your best blarney! This month, we are taking a little side trip from our Haikus and asking for your limericks, written in the spirit of Joomla!.

As the number of websites worldwide continue to grow at an incredibly fast pace, and the race to be at the top of search engine result pages is getting more and more competitive, SEO optimization is hardly a matter of choice any more. If you want to bring more traffic to your website — and not just any traffic, but visitors who are uniquely attuned to and looking exactly for the services and products that you offer, then take the time to optimize your website — it’s free, it’s easy to do, and most importantly, if you do it right, you can see real and tangible results within several months, or even sooner.

The long awaited Joomla! 1.6 is finally here and has been here for about two months now. Joomla! 1.6 introduced a lot of new changes and improvements and it was released 1084 days or 2 years, 11 months, and 19 days after Joomla! 1.5's release. Joomla! is now on a 6-month release cycle and Joomla! 1.7 is scheduled to be released in July 2011.

Not everyone is, or wants to be a programmer. However, you don’t have to be to help find and track down bugs in software. Using a few techniques, you can often get to the bottom of a problem and determine if it is a bug, user error, or something else. Since software development is an ongoing process, you may find yourself wondering when you come across a problem if it is a bug, or not.

Each month Joomla! users around the world gather for collaboration, learning, and good times with Joomla! User Groups in over 50 countries (55 to be exact). Groups range from get-togethers of 8 or 9 people, to meetups of over 40 people! I caught up with the Joomla! User Group in Suffolk, England for this last month's meeting for a good time, and a quick interview. We were able to talk with JUG members and get their thoughts on JUG's and how the Joomla! Community is affecting them.

Welcome to Joomla! in the Press/Media. You will find links and short descriptions of where you can read recent articles about Joomla! in the Press and Media.

Someone must have said something bad about Joomla! template clubs last month, because they certainly stepped it up a notch in February.

I wandered into the Joomla! community shortly after the fork of Mambo to Joomla! in 2005. I had no idea what Joomla! was. At the time, I was involved in a huge web-based enterprise project and wondered if something like Joomla! might be an alternative, or even compliment parts of an enterprise system. The commercial system we were building was really expensive. Joomla! on the other hand, had a lot of what the enterprise system didn't have right out of the box. I'd investigated other open source website systems and bulletin boards but when I stepped into the Joomla! community I knew I'd found something special.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

It's still early enough in the year to make some predictions about 2011: dedicated people continue to affirm their willingness to give back to the project, and the project leadership is collaborating in new ways to keep Joomla moving forward!

A Founder Member of Joomla! with an often quoted blog tag-line of 'agree or disagree - I don't care' we turn the table on Brian Teeman with a 5 minute interview, a format he successfully uses on his own award winning blog. From achieved childhood hopes he has become a 'Man of Joomla!', a counsellor, advisor and an advocate with a passion for fairness and our Joomla! Community.

Joomla! is a volunteer community. And, within that community, people come, people go, people stay. With each new arrival or departure, there are opportunities for change. Inspiration. A new direction, or a different way of looking at things. The changes may be subtle, or a total in-your-face-whammy. You, the User/Developer/Designer, may see it, or you may not. But know this... Change is inspiration, and, like the wind, it can go in many directions.

At the end of last year I was thinking what I could do to spread the word about the new Joomla! 1.6 and the result is the free Joomla! 1.6 - Beginner's Guide, that I have written. It has 174 pages and covers all the things which are important to know and a few others, too.

Matt Lipscomb is a member of the Community Leadership Team (CLT), Co-Manager of the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED) and the Joomla! Resources Directory (JRD). In his day job he is Creative Director for USA Freelancers, a Joomla! web design team.