Joomla! Community Magazine™

Testing code is an important part of software development, and automated testing should make sure that ongoing development doesn’t break existing functionality. Therefore, automated testing is very important in the quality management of our product Joomla!

Probably you are already aware that the first couple of Alpha versions of Joomla 4 have been released, and if you were curious enough you may have already installed it locally. If you did so then you may have noticed that the first page when you logged into administrator contained a couple of alerts. Well, those alerts, although they look like Bootstrap, are in fact custom elements! Find out more about what this means for you and your website.

A problem we have faced in our Joomla development work has been ensuring that the correct Google Tag Manager environment code is being deployed with the right environments - for example in our development environments we need to deploy the container code from GTM related to the dev environment, but in production, we need the live container code.

At the Joomla & Beyond Conference this year in Poland, the Marketing team was on a mission. With Joomla 3.7 already out and Joomla 4 just a few versions away, we had to get the inside scoop on what is happening with Joomla 4. And what better way to find this than catch hold of George Wilson - The release lead for Joomla ! 

So here is the full transcript of the interview. 

My first car was a Geo Metro and to save a couple bucks I would change the oil on it myself. It's not hard to do, however I didn't have any real tools beyond a crescent wrench and a robo-wrench. I would try not to strip the plug in the 6 inches of space under the car using the crescent and then catch the oil in milk jugs that I sliced the tops off of. Then, I would attempt to unscrew the filter with the robo wrench. This had a 50-50 chance of mangling it and spilling oil as I torqued it. These tools made the job a 45 minute trial where I would bloody my knuckles, get covered in oil, and end up cleaning puddles of it off the street. Eventually, I wised up and bought a ratchet set, an oil wrench, and a pan to catch the plug and all that oil.  The difference was magical: it became a 15 minute job without swearing, blood loss, or environmental catastrophes. And it was all because I used the right tools.

There are terabytes of poorly written code in the Internet's Joomla population.  This is because of the nature of Joomla as an extensible application. It's wonderful because anyone can create a solution for it and it's horrible because anyone can create a solution for it.  Because Joomla sites interweave the efforts and knowledge of hundreds of developers across space and time the highest virtue that its code can aspire to is cleanliness.  If you've never heard of code referred to as clean, what it boils down to is simply code that is easy to read, write, and maintain. In this article, will look at why elegant code should be avoided and three simple principles to writing good, clean, Joomla code.

If you are reading this post, chances are your website is running with an ancient version of PHP. You are not alone, PHP version 5.3 is used by 31.1% of all the websites and 5.4 has 29% share. Both of this PHP version already reached end of its life and no more security update will be provided. That means, you are already in big security risk!

My company worked on a web application that was basically an extension of the Joomla 2.5 core a few years ago.  We took over the app from another development company that had gotten stuck (we never would have modified the core.) It was being deployed to AWS and the original developers altered the configuration.php file to return different values from their local environments based upon environmental variables set by Amazon's cloud servers. When I saw this I thought, "There has got to be a better way."

Here are 5 things that you can do right now to both speed up your website and help your users have a much more enjoyable experience on your website.