Community Magazine

In the last 10 years, the internet has evolved at a rapid pace. Completely new ecosystems and markets have emerged on this backbone. The distribution of the userbase of the internet is completely different today than what it was a few years ago. In this article let's explore the impact of this change on content management systems and where things might go from here. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Joomla! is an incredibly powerful system out-of-the-box. Naturally, it can be extended through extensions (plugins, components, modules, templates, languages) to increase its functionality and make the site adapt to your needs. That brings us to one of the most common made mistakes in Joomla! site administration: installing too many extensions. Sure, that one might be handy, and hey - why not add that one too? It's common practice not to install too many extensions, and generally teached. However, from personal experience, this isn't followed too often....

This August I turned 10. That's very young you might say. Sure in human terms of that's pretty young..not even into teens yet. But in software terms..for that's what I am, being 10 is not necessarily that. I am not sure what it is in fact...But I am said to be more or less mature now. But then I have been stable and mature many a times in my life cycle so far...I am a foster child and I have been cared for by hundreds if not thousands of parents and each of them have put a bit of themselves in me. As you might imagine I have grown to have multifaceted personality. For some people I am a simple website building tool, for some a flexible content management system while some see me as a platform to build web applications on. And that's just some of the ways in which people tend to perceive me. Read my complete story!

Four years ago at a Joomla Day New York I demoed the latest updates to a Joomla extension I had developed with a client. They had commissioned a Wordpress version of the same extension from a WP developer and shared with me the install stats for both (which connected to the client's service). The installs were overwhelming Wordpress. It blew me away and I began to watch statistics for the popularity of the platforms and discovered that WordPress was devouring Joomla's market share. When I built my first Joomla 1.5 site, more sites on the Internet were powered by Joomla than any other CMS. Today, WordPress powers five times as many websites as Joomla does.