My name is Justine Ayebale, Vice President – OSM (Year 2020-21). Being a Ugandan and proudly African, it was a pleasure for me to speak for Joomla! CMS at the first DFA event where Google is in partnership with the CMS for Africa organisation.

What is DFA?

Developers for Africa (DFA);

The Developers for Africa project intends to foster a long-term community through education, funding, and tech support. DFA, in partnership with CMS for Africa (https://cmsafrica.org/), provides a platform for African developers to help contribute to the core development of popular CMSes. See: https://dfa.cmsafrica.org/

What is the main Goal of DFA?

To focus on solutions that improve performance, privacy, capabilities and security of Open Source platforms everywhere with a focus on the needs of African users and developers/designers.

I have engaged in 2 DFA events so far:

1. The first event took place on 14th April 2021 in which Brian M. was also a speaker. The discussion was about the CMS developer ecosystem through collaboration, education and funding. An ideal outcome of this meetup would be having 1-2 project ideas for Joomla! In Kenya that could be funded through Google's Open-Source Fund and picked jointly. This event was attended by 43 participants. Please visit https://dfa.cmsafrica.org/dfa-1/.
2. The second event took place on 18th and 19th August 2021. The discussion was about how Joomla’s current priority issues overlap with Chrome’s web platform priorities (Performance, privacy, capabilities, storytelling). The aim was to get local developers to submit interesting ideas for open-source CMS improvements to be potentially funded through Google’s Open-Source CMS Fund or other means. This event was attended by 60 participants.

How was my Experience with DFA?

DFA provides a platform from which African developers/ designers and other CMS users from multiple African locations openly share ongoing developments, insights on common issues that arise due to working with different CMS platforms. Most of the challenges and achievements are related and this project is an eye-opener and trust booster to reliably use CMSes as tools to easily manage content with fully inbuilt web vitals.

The web is becoming by no means the new normal to adapt and live up to, considering the world standards. So we need to embrace easy, timely and faster ways of working and delivering products/services. We should encourage each other to trust the use of CMSes to competitively deliver faster. We/you the developers/designers, web users should make it our daily practice to contribute towards CMSes development and continuity through user feedback, coding, debugging or if so financial backing right from our own local communities.

The potential of Joomla! CMS in Africa

Joomla! is well known for its secure functionalities with all versions that have given users/designers the comfort and continuous use. Better fun comes with the most recent release of Joomla4 which has a shorter workflow and better interesting features, very favourable to the new users to adapt. Joomla! 4 processes of easy transition and compatibility make Joomla! more adaptable. Also, Joomla! 4 has most of the recommended web cores inbuilt which is time and cost-saving. With this I anticipate Joomla! African community to grow bigger. Please, visit: https://www.joomla.org/4/