Do you sometimes wonder who the people behind the scenes are putting Joomla together? Most of the time it's users like you who have decided to give a little bit of time - answering a form post, translating some language strings, writing some documentation or perhaps testing some patches. Here's how you can give some Time4Joomla.
You will have seen the Joomla4All slogan which marketing introduced at the launch of Joomla4.
It has been followed in newsletters, press releases and articles with a series of refinements on the theme, Joomla4Accessibility, Joomla4Speed, Joomla4Security, you get the picture.
These are all things that Joomla delivers for us, its users and is a neat way to brand the features of Joomla and explain how Joomla can help us to work better and do more.
So what happens when you reverse the logic and put the action or attribute in front of the 4Joomla, you get a series of ideas around the theme of helping Joomla, how we as its users and creators can help Joomla to grow and do more.
So from that idea sparked the first of these, Time4Joomla.
Time4Joomla
The concept is simple and it's designed to make the most use of those little bits of free time we all have in our everyday lives. That moment on a train where you are bored, as a passenger in a car, waiting for an appointment. Time so small as a package that it gets wasted on reading about someone else's complaint on Social media, reading about some stars upset over another millionaires comments. Trivia that fritters away our time when we have time to kill.
But what if there was a really useful list of jobs and tasks that needed doing and would help the project which did not involve asking someone else, joining a team, navigating glip, all the excuses we find to not do a useful thing and read more about that new celebrity diet.
This is the concept behind Time4Joomla, a simple list of tasks that need doing that can be picked up and dropped as and when needed and which do not require reporting back to anyone about what has been done and what is outstanding.
How to give Time4Joomla
That's the great part with Time4Joomla, there are many ways you can help and you can dive in and find the task that fits your skill set and your time resources.
Here's a list of places you can get started...
Help Other Joomla Users
There's a number of Joomla community resources online that you can visit to share your expertise and experience with others.
- Forum.joomla.org is Joomla's main forum. Often there's posts waiting to be answered, or looking for an additional answer that can better help users. You never know when you might find the answer a question you have at some point is found in the forums.
- An alternative to the forum, Joomla Stack Exchange is a more curated support tool that is part of the wider Stack Exchange network. Currently many of the questions there are looking for more technical answers, so if you're familiar with Joomla's codebase, helping out here might be for you.
There's active discussions across a number of social media platforms that you might be interested in participating in too. Participating in conversations can often help users
Write Documentation for Joomla
The best place to find out how to use Joomla should be via the Documentation. Docs.joomla.org uses a wiki format to allow it to be a living documentation tool, and as part of that any user can register and add and update articles to better describe how to do things.
Get started contributing to Joomla Documentation.
Translate Joomla
Joomla is available in many language, but a number are not 100% translated at the moment. Though it's a big task getting a language to 100% translated, even translating a few sentences so that the percentage complete bar nudges ever higher is a helpful contribution. Getting a whole language pack to 100% may take many train journeys but it's something you can pick up and put down and will finally end in a language pack that you can be proud of and can also increase the uptake of Joomla in your language..
Check out this article from last month's Joomla Magazine on how to get started.
Test Joomla
The CMS release team has a sheet of tests that anyone who is familiar with Joomla can help complete. But your spare time may not fall within the release cycle window. If that's the case there is a project to automate some of these tests. If your journey to work results in a test written then that 15 minutes will save the project hours and days over the coming years!
Help Promote Joomla
So under this heading would come voting in awards, finding awards to vote in and supporting Joomla in any comments section for an awards. A good example is the CMS Critic Awards Nominations.
Keep an eye out for announcements in such online tools and find ways to participate, nominating Joomla, voting and promoting the joomla platform.
TrustRadius at the time of writing this article does not list Joomla. In their criteria page they state the things that need to happen to make Joomla appear
- Recency: Product must have 10 or more recent reviews (from the past year)
- Rating: Product must have a trScore of 7.5 or higher
- Relevance: Product must earn at least 1.5% of the site traffic in the category
With a few more people spending some minutes filling in reports, Joomla can feature once again in such a forum.
Other ways to help
- Find posts about joomla and add to them in the comments sections. Many articles are written by third parties and are often wrong in fact, based on very old versions or cast a poor light on Joomla. You can search out examples and then put your point of view. It's certainly more productive than reading the latest tips on removing red wine from the carpet and could just persuade someone to give Joomla another go.
- Find a poll asking about cms and vote for joomla
Participate in Joomla Events
Around the world you'll find local Joomla User Groups and Joomla Events running year-round. Post-pandemic, User Groups and Events should return to a more normal footing, but at the moment check the Joomla Events page for upcoming sessions, or follow various Joomla social media channels to see when events are announced.
Get Involved with Joomla
That's far from the exhaustive list of ways to contribute to Joomla, but it's certainly a great list of ways to get started and giving some Time4Joomla.
If you do have more time available, and a skill set that you think can help the project, then there's a number of teams looking for members and contributors to help achieve their missions.
You can find more details about many of them in other Community Openings articles over recent months, or jump over to the Contribute to Joomla page. The easiest way to tell us you're interested is to email