Joomla! Community Magazine™

At the recent J&Beyond Joomla conference in Barcelona a new SEO team was formed. The team agreed on the following mission statements:

In the Joomla community, we make progress when we work together. At times we differ (and even strongly so) about the best path to take, but we share a goal of improving the Joomla CMS, for all level of users, from all cultures and nations.

What do your members want? It is important to deliver what your members want, NOT what they need. Hang in there with me and I’ll explain.

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.

There are more CMS platform choices than ever. All of them boast powerful features but it’s not always clear how these features help us in real life. These are five reasons why many people choose Joomla to accomplish website goals and solve real world website challenges.

Yes, I have a rebellious soul. I'm almost a Brazilian Katniss Everdeen. And this is the reason why the Joomla! Project attracted me. First of all, because Joomla! - as an open source project - brings the values of collaboration and user empowerment that are very pleasing to me.

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school. This year, the Joomla Project is once again present and JCM talked to Puneet Kala, who is leading the group through this exciting moment.

We are proud to introduce to Joomla! Community the team of students selected to join us for the Google Summer of Code 2016. They show all our J!Diversity. Considering students and mentors, we have men and women from all continents in the world coding with us over next summer. 

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."