As we celebrate (along with many in the Joomla community) the start of 2016, we look at some of the highlights of 2015

• 2015 started off with the announcement that the Joomla project, in partnership with Siteground, had launched a new service, Joomla.com where users can create and build freely hosted Joomla websites.
• In February, the Production Leadership Team (PLT) announced the roadmap for version 2 of the Joomla! Framework.
• Joomla 3.4 was released with features including Frontend Module Editing and support for the new Google reCAPTCHA
• In May, after much debate, the combined Joomla leadership teams (Community Leadership Team, the Board of Directors of Open Source Matters, and the Production Leadership Team), voted to adopt the New Structure & Methodology proposal, and in September a Transition Team was elected.
• Good progress was made with the Joomla Certification Program.
• We celebrated the 10th birthday of Joomla! (and Open Source Matters) with many Joomla cakes, t-shirts, videos, JRum and Joomshi.
• The Joomla project was represented at various PHP and Tech events
• 2015 also had many PLT-organized code-sprints, Bug Squashing events, and numerous community organized events like Jandbeyond, and JoomlaDay events in various countries.
• Another successful Joomla World Conference (JWC) was held in November 2015 in Bangalore, India. Those who were not able to attend, can view 42 videos from the event on the Joomla YouTube channel. In 2016 the JWC is heading to Vancouver, Canada.

2015 has also been a tough year with the strains of organizational changes taking its toll. Passionate volunteers expressed strong and opposing views about what the best way is to organize the Joomla project, and how to move forward. This negatively affected interpersonal relationships and teams.

We need to honestly reflect on how we as a community deal with our differences.

In this month’s magazine

Cliff Pfeifer shares very timely advice on how each of us can make a positive difference in our community this year.

Also in this edition,

Carlos Cámara shares about Joomlers who are challenging each other in keeping fit, by getting involved in community-organized sports groups.

Brian Teeman challenges how we refer to ourselves or others as “just a volunteer”.

Tessa Mero shares her Joomla journey, and David, from the Joomla community in Kenya, shares his journey to the Joomla World Conference in Bangalore.

Dom Cassone explains how you can increase your authority with your membership site, and John Rampton shows how to avoid 3 common mistakes that newbie Joomla users make.

Best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous 2016.