Joomla! Community Magazine™

Joomla is a technical and serious thing, we admit, but we spend a lot of time on it, and it ends up taking up a lot of space in our lives.

As a result, our relationship with Joomla becomes philosophical, even metaphysical... 

Elisa Foltyn is very invested in Joomla and spares no time or effort in promoting the project, improving the cms and helping users.

She describes her path to Joomla as a journey with no end in sight.

Patrick Smits has followed a path in which many of our readers will recognise themselves. He used to work in design, then got into the web, and naturally chose Joomla. Let him tell us why.

It was at the Web Development Weeks at her university when Franciska Perisa discovered Joomla. She turned out to be good at it, and this made her want to do more. Read all about where she started, what happened next and what she’s doing now!

If there is one person you can ask for help, it is Alison Meeks. When she knows and can come and help, she is the first to say yes, especially if it's about Joomla: She admits herself: she hardly knows how to say no!
That's why she was appointed to the Joomla Social Media Team - Team Leader, Admin on the Facebook No Spam group (among others).

And that's also why we asked her how she learned Joomla: we knew that with her legendary kindness she wouldn't refuse us anything!

There are events, people, that illustrate the international and building side of Joomla.
Olivier Buisard of Simplifyyourweb grew up in France but his career path brought him closer to Open Source Matters' headquarters. Since then, he has lived in New York, but still has ties to his home country.

Peter Martin’s very first website was a one-pager. And no, not last year: in 1996! You could say he was way ahead of his time. Peter loves open source (he’s also an active member of the Linux community) and he likes working with Joomla because of its stability, flexibility, extensibility… and us, the community. He learned Joomla by getting his hands dirty and examining what goes on under the hood.

Darek Śnieg is the Support Team Lead at Cloudaccess.net, the hosting company where you can launch your own joomla.com website for free. The first Joomla website he made was for an organization of former career soldiers. This was ‘a lot of fun, but also quite a challenge’, that required some creativity and some inventive moves. Darek would advise everyone who needs more than a business card website to choose Joomla: “You’ll thank me later.”

Before Rachel Walraven decided to build websites for a living, she explored several other career options, all very non-tech. When she made her first website, she knew next to nothing about web development.

We all learn in different ways. Some of us learn by following written step-by-step instructions with or without screenshots, some by watching tutorial videos, some by asking others, and some by clicking around to see what happens. For Julie Steffers, it was a bit of ‘all of the above’. When she needed to create an intranet website, she started out by launching a website on launch.joomla.org, the platform that enables you to build fully functional Joomla websites and experience how Joomla works (for free!). And she learned a lot along the way.