Community Magazine

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.

University students from many parts of the world will spend the summer break ("winter break" in some countries) writing code and learning about open source development. Joomla! is one of the selected mentoring organizations in Google Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC 2016). Does it mean that students will be coding to make Joomla! even better? Yes! And we invite you all to join us in the GSoC 2016 journey.

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!