Joomla! Community Magazine™

The second in a series of articles on practical development, dealing with your working environment in developing for Joomla! Consult last month's introduction for what to expect.

Whether you are writing PHP code or styling a website with cascading style sheets (CSS), there are a range of tools which can make your life much easier and allow you to focus on writing good quality code quickly and efficiently. This "practical development" series of articles will focus on using PhpStorm as a development environment and will consider seven topics.

This is about a tool which has gained a lot of attention in the Joomla community over the last few months.

I'm a parent. That tends to sound a bit like a confession. But most people who know me also know that I love kids. I have three children right now, and hope to add more in the near future. I've learned many things from being a parent. I learned there is a strange phenomenon with children where they cannot hear something they are told unless I tell them multiple times. It's interesting because it doesn't seem to be all the time, only certain times, and usually only those times when they need to do something they don't particularly want to do. And I really get tired of repeating myself. It gets quite annoying after a while.

Among the many new features released with version 3.2 of Joomla!, the one that most caught my interest, and perhaps one of the less publicized but certainly very useful for administrators and interesting for developers, is the so-called "post-installation messages". These inform the site administrator about features that require your attention after the successful installation of an extension.

This article introduces you to the new JLayouts features in Joomla! 3.2. Most of the changes are focused in improve the flexibility of the system for third party developers.

Dear Joomla! developers, jQuery is already installed in Joomla! 3... KNOCK IT OFF! 

Today, the Joomla CMS is mainly implemented using PHP where JavaScript (JS) and CSS are contributing as minor supportive technologies. Joomla mainly uses JS to improve usability by providing rich interactions and responsiveness, but is it done right? Can we improve it? What are the new technological advancements related to JS? Can we use these in Joomla? This article is an attempt to answer these questions and bring more attention to improving Joomla CMS’s JS usage.

Registration is now open for CiviCon London 2013. The two day, annual CiviCRM user and implementer conference is Europe's biggest Civi meetup. CiviCRM is an open source CRM aimed at non profits with out of the box integration with Joomla! Whether you're already using or considering using CiviCRM, the conference will be packed with the essential presentations, workshops and people that will help your organization get the most from CiviCRM.

A few months ago, I adapted the great Bootstrap framework to Joomla, basing it on a few of the versions seen before. After a period during which I left it untouched, I revised and refined it, getting it ready to be used, at least on test sites.