Community Magazine

The last four years has seen quite a lot of excitement in the Joomlasphere as the community continues to grow and the software continues to be driven by innovative ideas. As with everything in a quickly evolving software marketplace, platforms come and go and Joomla! 2.5 is no different. Today we reflect back on its nearly four year life span and the framework it laid for Joomla to grow.

Delivering transactional emails is considered one of the most recursive and important tasks for a website owner. If your transactional emails fail to reach recipients’ inbox, it will be difficult for you to have the benefits of an automated email transaction. An automated email transaction is heavily dependent on a reliable SMTP server. However, using an ordinary email service provider such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Hotmail has its restrictions. This is because they allow only a certain number of emails to be sent by a particular user per day. You might be thinking what is a smart solution for transactional email delivery and how to configure it?

Some of the readers out there may know that I have been audio podcasting about Joomla for almost two years now.January 2015 will actually be the two year birthday of the Joomla Beat Podcast, one of the many passions in the Joomla Community that I have been carrying on almost every week. I was proud to hear also that I had inspired someone in the Spanish speaking community to start their own Joomla podcast in Spanish! Something I’m very excited to hear more about and see grow over the next few months.

It is very common to have issues like browser does not serves the latest javascript or stylesheet content, it serves the content from its cache which obviously does not contains the recent changes. The first solution which comes in our mind is to clean the browser cache and all sorted... right?. But you can not apply the same solution at your users’ end.

Every now and then the Joomla project organizes a Code Sprint. The purpose of a sprint is to improve a specific area of the Joomla ecosystem, this can be the code, documentation or something else. During a sprint a group of people with expertise in this specific area are brought together in one place. Not online but offline, real life meetings. Nothing beats a face-to-face meeting if you want to make things happen.

We’re used to seeing all Joomla community members attending only Joomla events. Nowadays that’s changing. David Hurley and Michael Babker are representing Joomla at a global event, the PHP World Conference mid-November. They will not only represent Joomla, but will also try to attract new members to the community. That’s worthy of an interview.

For the Polish Joomla community, last year was a revolution! From December 2013 to June 2014 our community organized six new Joomla User Group meetings. I want to share our model of creating awesome JUG meetings so that it can help others, and for them to see how to do JUG meetings for free (without any cost). 

Listening to Tessa's keynote on Volunteering at JoomlaDay Israel a thought struck me. If volunteering is so great, and I think it is and I have done it all my life, then why doesn't everyone do it and why don't those of us that do volunteer do it more. I have travelled the world and met so many people with amazing passion and skills for Joomla and yet I never see them contributing. Why is that? Is the problem with us? Is this a problem we can and should be solving? There are so many different ways that people can volunteer to help the Joomla project, so what is stopping some people from giving their time?

Just a few weeks ago, our OSM president, Sarah Watz and Community Leader, Ruth Cheesley, came back from one incredible experience, the Grace Hopper Conference. The Joomla! booth was approached by many students and young women interested in learning more about our Community and Project. But what does it really mean for our brand to get involved in such a big conference? What is the real take-away for our Community?

There are many Joomla events to wrap-up 2014 including one of the year’s largest events, the Joomla! World Conference. Joomla! User Group (JUG) meetings and JoomlaDays are intended for everyone from casual users to core developers. The third annual Joomla! World Conference, also intended for all types of Joomla users, will be held November 7-9 in Cancun, Mexico. Visit the Joomla! Events site to browse all events, submit an event or learn how to organize an event.