Community Magazine

An interview with Alison Meeks, Social Media Team Lead and Administrator of the Joomla Facebook Group.

It's April and in the Northern Hemisphere, it is associated with Spring, when flowers bloom. And the Joomla Community Magazine is blooming with yet another great issue for our readers.

Welcome to the JUG Round Up! It's time to see what's been happening with Joomla! User Groups around the world!

This was the motto of this year's JoomlaDay Poland 2017! This two-day event is an annual event for users and fans of this amazing content management system. Every year it is organized in another place, and this time we met in the capital of the West Pomeranian Province - in Szczecin.

2017 is on the way out, and now we are looking forward to a very bright year for web design and Joomla! Design styles over the past few years have been shifting toward the more minimal model, and the web is looking very standardized at the moment, but some new and familiar trends will make a significant impact in 2018.

Help a non-profit while helping yourself! Broaden your CMS horizons and give back to the community at the same time. I’ll share how I learned the Joomla! CMS and how I continue to expand my capabilities. Just getting started with Joomla? Read on.

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.

Last month I attended the Joomla World Conference #JWC17 in Rome, Italy. Since my first JWC visit to Vancouver last year, I've joined a couple of global teams including Showcase, Certification and the Joomla Community Magazine (JCM), where I help out with things like moderation, English-language proof reading and documentation. This year, in addition to the actual conference, I also got to attend some team meetings prior to and during the conference.

On November 17, the first Alpha for Joomla 4 was released. Whilst this release was intended for developers to check their extensions as soon as possible for their compatibility the Joomla 4 User Interface Team has something nice in store for you. In the last few years, we have been planning, discussing and drafting different concepts of the Joomla 4 backend. First of all: the chance to work on the overall backend user interface is a really big honour for us and we say thank you to all those that welcome us to such a great team. It’s a pleasure to work with such passionate people. Our challenge was to design a backend that mostly fits into the given technical structure of Joomla and to change as much as needed, but as little as possible. We want to invite you to take a ride through the draft of the Joomla 4 Backend design.

On November 17, the first Alpha for Joomla 4 was released during my talk at Joomla World Conference, with a second quickly released after the Joomla In Action sessions. This release was intended for developers to check their extensions for compatibility with the new version, and showcases some of the exciting new features we have planned. In this article I’m going to run through some of the exciting things you can expect to see in Joomla 4, and the things we’re going to continue working on over the next few months as development continues.