Community Magazine

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.

The 'Search' and 'Smart Search' components have coexisted since Joomla 2.5.

Search (or com_search) would provide a straightforward search feature while Smart Search would offer indexing and more advanced search capabilities with filtering.

Here in the United States, the month of November brings with it thoughts of thankfulness and a spirit of giving. With that in mind, Olivier Buisard and I wanted to share a word of thanks.

Last quarter the Production department published the teams goals for the next quarter.

The plans they wished to achieve, hoping to inspire them to succeed but also, by sharing, to encourage others outside of production to also get involved and come on board to make it all happen.

So take a look at what is planned for the next quarter and see if there is anything you can put your weight behind.

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!

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!

Have you ever heard the story of the ancient city Troy? It had massive walls, keeping attackers outside and the city safe. However, the greek army, attacking the city, had a genius idea: they pretended to stop their attack and travel back home, while leaving a gift for the people of Troy: a huge wooden horse. The people of Troy were thankful for that gift and pulled the horse inside the city's walls - not knowing that greek soldiers have hidden themselves in the horse, crawling out at night, opening the doors for the rest of their army and thereby dooming the city.

Joomla 3 has been around for a long time. It is easy to forget how successful the series has become and how much it has evolved over the course of the minor versions.

As it approaches its final year as a mature, stable version of Joomla, it is about to enter its security support phase.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. are the joint release leads for Joomla 5, now in the planning stage. I managed to ask them both for their ideas and views on the project at the end of a Production meeting. This joint venture is being undertaken by two very experienced developers.