Magazine

September is about to end and the JCM team is glad to bring you another issue of the Joomla Community Magazine.

Many things happened from the last edition of the Mag in the J!sphere: the most important is the release of the 4th Beta of Joomla 4 and the 2nd Alpha version of Joomla 3.10.

Joomla is an amazing piece of software. It’s extremely powerful, super flexible and very reliable. With Joomla, you can create any kind of website. I know that. You probably know that. But the rest of the world? Not so much, which translates in Joomla’s market share dropping. The good news is: I can do something about that, and so can you.

The Joomla! Project was founded on August 2005 and some people in the Community might have joined a few years later, not knowing which were the emotions felt or the challenges that were faced by the founders of the project. After 15 years and countless releases of Joomla, we're happy to take a moment to collect the memories of those people who started this Project and founded our amazing Community.

As a web agency, you may be looking for the CMS that fits your clients’ needs best, so you can create professional, powerful, secure, mobile-friendly and easy-to-maintain websites for them. Look no further: Joomla, time and time awarded as “best free CMS”, has it all. It’s versatile, flexible, easy to use, secure, and suitable for countless types of websites. And on top of all that it’s completely free. We give you ten reasons why you should try it today!

This month we talked to Philip Walton from the London Joomla User Group. Philip’s also the Joomla CMS Release Team Leader. During COVID-19 he’s been keeping the patch testing process ticking along with Bugs & Fun @ Home, which is how I came to meet him virtually back in April this year.

Bugs & Fun

Good bug testing for software projects is about destruction not confirmation. You can easily follow the test instructions for a Pull Request (PR) and show that it fixes the problem it’s designed to fix. But what else might the new code be doing?

Elections happen twice per year in Joomla and the Magazine takes this opportunity to interview the newly elected Board Members to know their program and vision for their role. In this election cycle, Jaz Parkyn has been confirmed at the head of the Programs Department of Joomla, the house of the Certification Team, Volunteers Engagement Team, Education Outreach and Joomla Event Travellers Program.

Speed, security, compatibility, performance. These are just four of the reasons you should keep your PHP version up to date. In this 2020 revision on the topic, we cover a number of ways you can go about updating your PHP version to avoid problems in the lead up to the release of Joomla 4 which has a minimum requirement of PHP version 7.3 or above.

Users don't want to feel locked into what a software platform provides. Open source comes to the rescue! Open source software means that the source code for that software is publicly available to be used and modified within the developer community. This type of software promotes collaboration, transparency, and mutual benefits. 

Software, the programs whereby a computer and the internet functions, has become one of the most used commodities since the advent of computers and the internet. Every electronic device runs on software. It is software that makes these things useful and smart to us. It is now more than ever necessary for software to be licensed in such a way that it will be as versatile and as free as wood in the hand of the user.

We continue our research on accessible resources for Joomla! 3.x and to present what we are doing in the Joomla Accessibility Team waiting for the new 4.0 release.

Community Openings

Would you like to get more involved with Joomla? Read more about this month’s highlighted volunteer positions below.