Community Magazine

I was a JoomlaDay virgin. I had not been to a JoomlaDay anywhere in the world. I had not organised a JoomlaDay ever before. Back in February of 2013 when my co-organizer, James Foreman, said he wanted to do a JoomlaDay in our area, I had no idea what was ahead.

With 157 user groups around the world, there is always something exciting and interesting happening in the Joomla! Community - this is a monthly round-up highlighting new Joomla! User Groups, events, and reviews of JUG meetings. If you have anything you would like me to feature from your Joomla User Group please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - you must be writing from a Registered Joomla! User Group (i.e. listed at https://community.joomla.org/user-groups.html).

This month I'll try to clarify how Joomla works for users without any technical knowledge. We will start by defining Joomla as a CMS (Content Management System). That means that Joomla does... what? It's easy: Joomla allows you to manage any "content" on the internet which covers just about anything you can think of.

I sometimes come across Joomla sites that are built only for blogging. There are a lot of possibilities: you can use Joomla native , K2, and all sorts of CCKs. Today I decided to test an extension from the community choice extensions poll from several months back. Let's put EasyBlog from Stackideas on the bench...

The Joomla! World Conference is holding a fan art contest with our sponsor, StickerMule.com, giving community members the opportunity to get creative with the Joomla! logo. 

Sticking to a deadline can be a challenge in an Open Source project like Joomla! that is run entirely by volunteers. On the magazine, the first of the month is a deadline we cannot miss, and haven't in over three years. We launch on weekends, weekdays, birthdays, vacation days, even New Year's Day! But in order to keep bringing you all the Joomla news that's fit to print, we are  dusting off and adding definition to our submission guide…

With Joomla’s 8th anniversary there was lots to celebrate. Quite some milestones have been achieved. But instead of taking the time to celebrate there is lots of work yet to be done in order to achieve our next milestones!

The Joomla! World Conference is coming up soon! It will be held on November 8-10, 2013 at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts (USA). If you have never attended a Joomla event before, this is the event to attend. If you are a regular at Joomla events, this is the one you don't want to miss! Learn more: http://conference.joomla.org/

As a technical writer, I think Opensource Matters is missing an important marketing opportunity by not targeting Joomla! at the professional writing community. By "professional writing community," I don't mean novelists, poets, or publishing company editors (though, Joomla! would be great for them too) - I mean professional writers in the corporate world: technical writers, instructional designers, and marketing personnel. While the professional writing community is a smaller, more-niche market than the corporate CMS market and the software development community, I have thought for some time that Joomla! could be the next "killer app" for professional writers.

Every so often I have some tweets in my timeline where I can watch people from Joomla! talking really bad about Wordpress. Or Drupal. Or another CMS. And most of the times, people do this because they see all the opensource CMS as opponents on something that they call "the CMS market". Now, take a seat, because here comes a shocking truth: neither Drupal nor Wordpress nor any other opensource CMS is an opponent for Joomla.