Joomla! Community Magazine™

Joomla 5, released on October 17th, marks a significant milestone in CMS evolution. This latest version, two years in the making, elevates the Joomla experience with its unmatched security, swift performance, and stellar code quality. At the heart of this leap forward is Joomla's unwavering dedication to innovation, performance, and security, necessitating a match in its underlying database systems.

Since version 4.1 (and so also in 5.x series) Joomla introduced a very interesting new feature called "Scheduled Tasks".

One of the main features of Joomla 4.3 was Guided Tours. When you install or update to Joomla 4.3 and log into the administrator area, you are greeted with the ability to “Take a Tour” in the top menu. This has helped many to learn how to use Joomla and understand the functionality of Joomla, but now Guided Tours has had a makeover. Here, we take a deep dive into all that Guided Tours in Joomla 5 has to offer.

Do you use Joomla’s built-in Cassiopeia template? And would you like to (re)style the pages on your website, but don’t know where to start? Then this series is for you! Joomla has some lesser known functions we can use to style our pages without the need of overrides.

Wouldn't it be great if you could show related articles below or next to the article your visitor is reading? Joomla has an easy to use feature for that, built into the core. It's a module called Articles Related, and it's really easy to use.

Wouldn't it be nice to have your images resized upon uploading? Without having to use a third party plugin? Let's explore the core, because Joomla! 4 has this built in. All you need to do is configure it!

Template overrides are, for me, the most powerful feature of Joomla. I use them a lot and they are what makes the difference between a good looking website and a great one. They can be as simple as moving the intro image above the article title to something more complex, including CSS and JavaScript changes, such as creating a photo gallery from a category of articles or creating a set of buttons to filter the content.

I remember when the internet was first popularised and the words “world wide web” and “internet” became essential for any headline writer. Soon after the point that the average person in the street would rant “If I hear one more mention of this wibbly wobbly web thingy Im going to” and you can use your own imagination to end that sentence.

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.

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.