Community Magazine

These have been busy days in our community, the like of which has rarely been seen before. Twitter has been burning with feedback accompanied by the Joomla! hashtag, and that's fine. It is good to see the community actively involved, even on issues that generate passionate discussions. We are all members of the same community.

Joomla 1.5 is not supported by the Joomla project for quite some time now. You still can continue to use Joomla 1.5, but (security) updates will no longer be released. Furthermore, both Joomla 2 and Joomla 3 have many new features and improvements. Perhaps you recognize it: once you use Joomla 2 or Joomla 3, managing a Joomla 1.5 website really feels old-fashioned and you notice how greatly Joomla actually improved.

The second in a series of articles on practical development, dealing with your working environment in developing for Joomla! Consult last month's introduction for what to expect.

What do you think about the administrator panel of Joomla! 3.x? The opinions are split. I for one got some serious negative feedback from my clients not wanting to upgrade, saying that the panel is not user friendly. Some of them said they were used to the old panel and it's hard for them to make the learning curve once again. Add to that the fact that most templates are not designed for RTL (right-to-left) languages, and in an RTL country like Israel, you are stuck. 

In this and an upcoming article, I would like to provide all the available information about the evolution of the Joomla Certification program, the actions performed so far, and a firsthand look by one of the team leaders at the future of this interesting project.

If there is one thing we never have to worry about, it is the vibrancy of our Joomla! community, and how involved our community members are, on topics of all kinds, and even better, all over the entire world!

Join us at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts for two days of Joomla! learning, sharing, and networking! We have an exciting weekend planned, so bring your tablet, laptop and thinking cap... we are going deep! 

Is your Joomla website slow? You should definitely work on that: users hate slow websites, and they may leave your site earlier then they otherwise would, resulting in low conversion. Any site that needs more then 2 seconds to load could be at risk. Also, Google even says that site speed is used to determine your place in their rankings.

What is nice to know: it should not be that hard to improve the speed of your Joomla website. While sometimes you can hear stories that Joomla is slow, this will usually be because of incorrect setup or bad hosting companies, and you can work on both. Especially if you know what to look at, improving the speed of your Joomla website may not be too hard, and making it load in less then a second should be possible.

Already a month has gone by in this brand new year of 2014. After the leadership took a little holiday break, as you all hopefully did, they started the engine in full mode with (re)new(ed) energy.

CMS AFRICA, an organization which creates awareness on various open source CMSs is partnering with Kenya’s premier Business Institute of higher learning, Strathmore University, to host the CMS Africa Summit. The two day summit slated for March 7th and 8th, Nairobi, Kenya, is expected to attract web designers, web analysts, app developers, web administrators, government agencies, and digital marketers in Africa.