Joomla! Community Magazine™

Joomla exists thanks to the dedication of its volunteers. In this article we would like to express our gratitude and respect to Harald Leithner who served for long time as Release Leader for the Joomla 3.9.x series. Harald has served the project in several capacities over the years, he was also the Production Department Coordinator in the 2019-20 term. But let's get to know in depth the daily job of the Release Leader, with a short interview directly to Harald.

As a Joomla user, you may wonder whether the Joomla! extensions and services you use will be compatible with the upcoming major version, Joomla 4. What better way to find out than asking the developers? For our February issue, we had the pleasure to interview Robert Deutz from BackupMonkey, a dashboard you can use to backup, update and maintain all your websites at once. And together with the guarantee that their service will be fully J4-ready, he also gives us a lot of useful tips for offering maintenance to our clients!

With the stable version of Joomla 4 getting closer, the Joomla Community Magazine is interviewing Joomla extensions developers to find out what path they are following towards Joomla 4. This month we had the chance to interview Oliver Buisard from Simplify Your Web, who develops extensions for Joomla only and is fully committed to making our lives as web designers easier.

Nicky Veitch had a career in IT, and she came across Joomla when she was searching for a solution to sell digital products. Creating her first website was so much fun that she decided to make a career switch. Nicky is quite active in the Joomla Community, which she describes as ‘friendly and welcoming’.

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.

Eoin Oliver can’t really remember when he made his first Joomla website, but he does remember that it was a very cool one, and how amazed he was to have professional software to build it with. He played around with several different systems before he decided to go with Joomla.

Everyone in the Joomla community has heard her name, especially if it is related to documentation or translations. We are talking about Sandra Decoux, who has been involved with Joomla since the early days. She has been part of several teams within the organization and is a community pillar. Let's know her a little more!

Meet a Joomler: Viviana Menzel

Viviana Menzel is co-organizer of JoomlaDay Germany, a member of Joomla’s CMS Maintenance team and, together with Christiane Maier-Stadtherr, team leader of the Frontend Template Working Group. Would you like to know how this Argentinian biology graduate ended up in Germany building websites for a living? Read her story below!

Getting services ready

The Joomla ecosystem is vast. A large community among which, in addition to extension and template developers, there are also service providers. In our interviews about the preparation for the release of Joomla 4, we also needed to know how this part of the community is working. That's why, on this occasion, we approached Victor Drover from Watchful.net, a website management tool.

Component Creator

Joomla 4 Beta 5 has been released, meaning that the Release Candidate version is one step closer. The Joomla Community Magazine continues to approach developers, to see first-hand how they are preparing for the arrival of the next major version of Joomla.

On this occasion, it is the turn of Søren Beck Jensen, the man behind Component Creator, a component to create components.