Community Magazine

A fresh new site needs to be built and you’re faced with a decision. To build this site with the current Joomla! Long Term Support (LTS) release or the latest Joomla! Short Term Support (STS) release? The answer is, of course, it depends. Your experience will be different depending on the choice you make. This article will cover categories of site owners and what they expect for their sites, key points for consideration and some example scenarios.

The most important feature that was released with version 3.2 of Joomla, in my opinion, is without a doubt the "Joomla Extension Finder aka Install from Web" which allows you to install extensions listed in the JED (Joomla Extensions Directory) in a simple and rapid way directly from the control panel.

This is the first in a short series of articles intended to help technical writers and instructional designers learn how to build Joomla web-help systems. However, if you’re not a professional writer, you may still have an interest in the topic. For example, maybe you’re a one-person development shop, or you work for a small company without technical writers, and you want to write and publish your own software documentation. If you fall into the latter category, you will find these articles are geared toward beginners, as most writers will have less experience with Joomla. But, I hope they will give you a few ideas on how you might build your own publishing platform.

In my first article, I posed the idea that Joomla! could be the next "killer app" for professional writers. In this article, I compare Joomla to commercial help development tools and, hopefully, provide writers with a compelling case for switching to Joomla. I think Joomla offers the best path forward in the evolution of help development.

It's easy to take custom content types for granted these days. After all, Joomla 3.2 has core advances that make many CCKs seem totally unnecessary. Despite these improvements, clients still value a tailored experience. From the site form to the final layout, a custom content type will give your clients a simplified publishing platform.

At the Joomla World Conference in Boston last month I attended Ryan Boog’s session on “Making Your Website Wicked Awesome - Practical Uses and Tips on Utilizing Bootstrap in Joomla!”. My understanding of Bootstrap was pretty minimal, so I decided to pull myself up… and dive in!

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.

Being a part of the community I sometimes wonder how I started 6-7 years ago with Joomla!... We didn't have Facebook or Twitter, where we could ask for support or help with extensions. These days I wonder if newbies (sorry for the terminology) know how to search in the JED. Search in the WHAT...?  

It is known that the text editor in Joomla allows special configurations needed to incorporate content in the code. There are times when I do not want to change these settings to keep some order on our website for the authors, but nevertheless we would like to add modules with PHP or XHTML code, as in the case of widgets. The subject of this article, by way of tutorial, is to explain how to enter Javascript, PHP, HTML or CSS code in modules without relying on the editor you have installed (JCE, TinyMCE, FCK, etc..). As an example, I will illustrate how to add a Twitter widget to your website.

This is Step 2 in the Rebuilding Our Site series. We had to upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5. This entry discusses the tools and tactics we considered when upgrading to a newer version of Joomla.