Joomla! Community Magazine™

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

The Joomla API is a very interesting topic because it is so powerful.

But there is much to tell so I propose to start a new series of articles.

Joomla is an incredibly powerful and versatile Content Management System (CMS). Most of us think of Joomla when it comes to build complex websites, directories, and e-commerce stores. But these applications are more in the Content Management world. What happens when we need to develop a different type of web application? In those cases, it's common to use custom development and build our projects from scratch.

Whenever Joomla gets picked as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) candidate there is a flurry of activity around several projects. In 2022 one of the projects put forward was Guided Tours. This is a project that has been tackled by several students over several years and each one has nudged closer to the finishing line, but never quite got there. That's why it's especially gratifying to see Guided Tours as the main feature of the Joomla 4.3 release. It's the culmination of a lot of teamwork and a great example of what can be achieved if you just keep at it.

You probably know how to organise your content with categories. But what if you want to be able to show content from multiple categories, based on something they have in common? That’s where tags can be useful. And the good part is: you can use this right out of the box, because it comes with the Joomla core.

At the Joomla Community Magazine, we love it when people write books about Joomla (and maybe even more when these people are our own team members!). In this month’s issue, Laura Gordon reviews Joomla! 4 Masterclass: A practitioner's guide to building rich and modern websites using the brand-new features of Joomla 4 by Luca Marzo.

Looking back, looking forward

This week I stumbled across a copy of a keynote presentation given by Paul Delbar at JoomlaDagen 2012 all about Joomla 5 (although he was a bit trendy and used the Roman Numeral V).

In the previous article, I looked at Matomo, what it is and what it does.
https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/february-2023/web-analytics-alternative-to-google-analytics-matomo

There were several pros and cons that we went through and the costs were made clear. In this follow up I will go through the resources that are available to use Matomo as either a self-hosting package or a cloud package.

This months interviewee has only joined volunteering in the Joomla project three years ago. And he is quite active online too, answering questions from Joomlers for example. He is the Team Lead of the Joomla Extensions Directory team, come and meet Mark Fleeson!

So what's certification all about and why does it matter?

Is it worth creating a Joomla 4 certification and would those who did the Joomla 3 certification want to become retested against Joomla 4?

What does a Joomla 4 certificate bring to Joomla and more important, who is going to make it happen?

Over 15 years ago Cédric Keiflin crossed the road of Joomla, he learned the CMS, but that’s not all. He shared his knowledge via certain products and his writings, in the French-speaking and international community.

Last week I visited a website and saw something that I hadn’t seen for what seems like over a decade - a counter telling me I was the 3619th visitor to the site.

When I say that a webpage speaks a lot about its owner, be it a company, a government agency, a project or a person, I am not talking about its contents and layout. I am referring to many things that become explicit when approaching the process of crafting a page for any of them.

Today I'll give you a short overview of the contact component (com_contact) of Joomla! The contact component is a really powerful tool in your Joomla instance, which is underappreciated by most users.

In our previous article about writing for the Joomla Community Magazine we explained how you can create an account on the JCM, the two ways you can write (submit directly or share a Google doc first) and, very briefly, how to submit your article. In this article we show you how to do that step by step.

As the Events Team lead, and the JUG Team lead, we want to see Joomla User Groups publish their events, because the Joomla Community wants to know about all your events. We also want you to add these events to your JUG’s pages in a way that requires low effort because we want you to spread the word.