Joomla! Community Magazine™

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.

Joomla is an incredibly powerful and versatile Content Management System (CMS). Most of us think of Joomla when it comes to build complex websites, directories, and e-commerce stores. But these applications are more in the Content Management world. What happens when we need to develop a different type of web application? In those cases, it's common to use custom development and build our projects from scratch.

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.

In the previous article, I looked at Matomo, what it is and what it does.
https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/february-2023/web-analytics-alternative-to-google-analytics-matomo

There were several pros and cons that we went through and the costs were made clear. In this follow up I will go through the resources that are available to use Matomo as either a self-hosting package or a cloud package.

So what's certification all about and why does it matter?

Is it worth creating a Joomla 4 certification and would those who did the Joomla 3 certification want to become retested against Joomla 4?

What does a Joomla 4 certificate bring to Joomla and more important, who is going to make it happen?

After our previous series last year about how extension developers are getting their extensions ready for Joomla 4, we now have contacted a few developers in how in hindsight this transition went and if they came across challenges.

Once, there was a time when testers had to manually test everything in Joomla, clicking through all the views and features each and every time a change was made. It was exhausting, cumbersome and prone to errors.

Along came Selenium! A tool to automatically control browsers, defining long click paths through all of Joomla, repeatable, reliable, not exhausting and requiring less people-power. And the testers saw all the tests that they made, and it was very good.

What if there would be a completely free and open source, fully portable WAMP development stack, created with Joomla developers in mind? Guess what: there is! Two Joomlers are working on it. Troy Hall decided to create (or rather, fork) it, Jacob Waisner joined him in the project, and Bearsampp is now available for everyone to use. Find out what it is, who it is for and what you can do with it!

In a hotel conference room in Darmstadt, Germany, a small team of Joomla enthusiasts got to grips with Docusaurus, taming the beast to the advantage of the Joomla developer community. This neat package of software is probably the most important change in Joomla documentation for a long time, and with the added bonus of slaying the dreaded MediaWiki captcha once and for all!

Have you ever wondered what goes on in departments? Or heard people within the community talk about ivory towers, them and us, hidden agendas and wondered if any of that was true? The reality is much more boring than a conspiracy theory. When volunteering, giving your time to write code, the part everyone hates is writing the documentation, and writing a forward plan (roadmap but less solid, aspirational) comes at the very bottom of the priority list!