Joomla! Community Magazine™

A four day Code Sprint for Automated Testing aspects of the Joomla CMS and the Framework took place in Germany at the beginning of November.

Joomla 3.4.4 is scheduled for release on Monday 7th September and a release candidate is available for testing. Each time there is a new release, whether its a bug fix release or a new feature release, you will always find people asking "have they fixed this yet?" or complaining that "this bug that has been there for years" has still not been fixed.

Last month I described how a new feature was developed to count the number of articles in each category. At the end of the 2nd day of JoomlaDay France 2015, the feature was working… that is, it counted all articles (for com_content) in the Category Manager for Articles. I got it working by adding a hard-coded “if extension = com_content” check in the Category Manager. That’s not a solution but a workaround, I was fully aware of that.

How does a new feature end up in Joomla? This is a story about how a new feature is developed and how it might get into a next version of Joomla. From conception, to development, to community feedback & help, to testing, and (hopefully) to adding it to the core code. The story you are about to hear is true; only the names have not been changed to credit the people who helped me out.

I was recently working on a project where I needed to add customer testimonials. I wanted to output them using the schema.org/Reviews format. As I searched for solutions, everything I was finding was more than I needed. My goal was to keep it simple for my client to use, but still be able to output the right format. The easiest approach for my client was to add fields to the Articles (com_content) extension within Joomla. Of course I didn’t want to actually modify the com_content code or the #__content table in Joomla. Otherwise that would lead to maintenance and upgrade headaches down the road. So, plugins to the rescue!

It is very common to have issues like browser does not serves the latest javascript or stylesheet content, it serves the content from its cache which obviously does not contains the recent changes. The first solution which comes in our mind is to clean the browser cache and all sorted... right?. But you can not apply the same solution at your users’ end.

We’re used to seeing all Joomla community members attending only Joomla events. Nowadays that’s changing. David Hurley and Michael Babker are representing Joomla at a global event, the PHP World Conference mid-November. They will not only represent Joomla, but will also try to attract new members to the community. That’s worthy of an interview.

At the end of 2013 I was asked to develop a web app for creating interactive calculators called Calculoid. It was as exciting for me as for a kid at candy store, first because I was the one who could choose technologies for this project, and second because it was the same week the shiny new Joomla Framework was released. I decided to develop the app as a Single Page Application (SPA) with AngularJS at the client side and at the server side I decided to use, as you can probably guess, the Joomla Framework.

On a breezy Chicago summer day, the opening keynote of the first Joomla! Developer's Conference of the current decade tackled the challenge of demystifying software licensing with an episode of, "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Developer?"

Looking back through history we can see those moments of inspiration and those ‘game-changing’ movements. We admire and respect the innovative leaders which blazed the trail and lead the way into the future. We admire them because we know it’s a difficult job. We admire them because at times they were scoffed and ridiculed their ideas were rejected and their sanity questioned. Yet they continued. They persevered and they saw what no one else saw. They saw the future. And they were overwhelmed with the burden to get us there.