Before I got my current job as Coordinator Communications & Digital, I ran my own company for 25 years. The first 15 years I was a writer / editor / journalist / writing coach. 

In 2009 I started working with Joomla, not knowing anything about webdesign. I joined a JUG in 2012, two months later I was co-organizer :) (and stayed co-organizer for about five years).

I loved working with Joomla so much that I started projects, just to be able to create a website for them. That's when I thought: hey, maybe it's time for a career switch. In 2014 I decided to go pro with Joomla and switch to webdesign instead of writing. 

Volunteer work

I already mentioned the JUG. After that I did a number of other things over the years:

  • Writer: I wrote articles about Joomla in a Dutch webdesigner magazine.
  • Speaker at JUGs and JoomlaDays.
  • Member of the Dutch JoomlaDagen team for three years.
  • Member of the team that organized all three editions of Joostock (a Joomlacamp/unconference event).
  • Editor of the Dutch Joomla web agency brochure, a brochure webdesigners can use to convince their potential clients that Joomla is the right choice for them.

In 2020 I've started contributing to the Joomla Community Magazine, first as an author, and since 2022 I'm Team Leader of the wonderful Joomla Community Magazine Team. 

Why I contribute to Joomla

To many people Joomla is just a tool. But if you look a little closer, you'll notice it's much more than that. It's a living system, raised and nourished by a community of volunteers dedicating their time to make it the best CMS ever. Without volunteers, Joomla wouldn't exist. It's not 'just a product'. Everyone who uses Joomla, can do so because someone, somewhere, contributed to it. I want to give back to the community that keeps Joomla alive.

And, probably needless to say: I love being part of that community. 

Contributing to Joomla by volunteering brought me so much: valuable experience, more knowledge and a better understanding of Joomla and its community, and the opportunity to work together with a crowd of lovely people all over the world.

My favourite Joomla 4 feature - Extendibility (Søren Beck Jensen)

December-Soren

Yes, we all love the Joomla core and all the possibilities that come with it. But for Søren Beck Jensen, the beauty of Joomla lies in the extendibility. Joomla follows a predictable development pattern, which makes it very suitable for complex projects that need custom (extensions) development. In this issue, Søren tells us how every core feature and functionality can be extended, and along the way provides us with some useful tips on how to do it.

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My Custom Dashboard - Florian Bauer

December-CustomDashboard

The Joomla 4 Dashboard has a lot of options. Which is great, except when you see it for the first time. For people new to Joomla, it can be confusing to see all the things you can do. Where should you click to create new content? To upload an image? To do other things? If you build a website for people not used to working in the Joomla backend, you can make it a lot easier for them by customizing the Dashboard.

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My Custom Dashboard - Quick icons module

November-CustomDashboard

As we all know or experienced first-hand, the Joomla 4 Dashboard can be pretty overwhelming if you’ve never seen it before. The good news is: it doesn’t have to be. The Dashboard is very customisable, and more and more website designers decide to create beautiful and easy to use custom Dashboards for their clients (or for themselves). Jeroen Moolenschot, for instance, made a custom Dashboard module to add quick icons for much-used functionalities… and decided to share it with the whole Joomla community.

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Meet the Team: JCM

November-JCMTeam

Within the Joomla organization, quite a number of teams are working on all sorts of projects. We at the Joomla Community Magazine are really curious about what each team is doing, who’s in it, how they work together, what the people are like and how all of us can help them. What better way than asking them? And since there are so many teams, we thought we’d make a series out of this, starting with our own team: the JCM. So if you’re as curious as us: pleased to meet you!

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My favourite Joomla 4 feature - The Media Manager

November-ChrisWilcox

It’s been a few months now since Joomla 4 came out, and all over the world people are building websites with it. As you may know, Joomla 4 has a number of great new features. In this issue of the Joomla Community Magazine long time Joomla user Chris Wilcox tells us about his favourite: the Media Manager, that enables content managers to edit images in the backend of their Joomla website.

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My favourite Joomla 4 feature - customizable dashboard

September-J4Dashboard Joe Sonne about his favourite Joomla 4 feature

Joomla 4 comes with a couple of pretty neat new features, and at the Joomla Community Magazine we love to hear what you do with them. In this issue, Joe Sonne tells us how he customizes the administrator dashboard for his backend users. This is relatively easy; all you need is curiosity, creativity and a good idea of what your users need. And if you know a bit of CSS and HTML, you can knock yourself out creating the best user experience ever for your users.

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Getting extensions ready for Joomla 4 - Alex Andreae (SourceCoast)

Sept-SourceCoast

Joomla 4 Stable is out, and of course, you want to migrate your site as soon as possible. But… wait… what about your extensions? If they’re not ready, they might cause your site to break (always make a backup, people). Of course we have Joomla 3.10 with the pre-update checker to establish if your extensions are ready, but the JCM goes a little further: we ask the developers. This issue we had a nice conversation with Alex Andreae from SourceCoast, the developers of the go-to tool for connecting your website to social networks: JFBConnect.

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How I learned Joomla - Peter Martin

August-Peter

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.

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16 year old Lena created her own website: “It was actually really fun to do!”

August-Lena

She's exactly the same age as Joomla. She had an Instagram account, and a shop on Etsy, but 16 year old Lena wanted more: her own website, with her own design and her own content, where she could show all the creative things she does. With a little help from her mother, she managed to get it up and running in just two weeks. They had a lot of fun creating it, and Lena was surprised about how easy it was to build a Joomla website: “I thought making a website was way more difficult.

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Getting extensions ready for Joomla 4 - Chetan Madaan (JoomDev)

August-JoomDev

As you may have discovered by now, Joomla 4 Stable is out! This is the time you might start to worry about your extensions. Are they compatible? And if they’re not, will they ever be? And if they’ll be compatible, when?

You might have heard about Joomla 3.10 being the bridge to a smooth transition from version 3.x to 4, but maybe you need a little more reassurance. We get that, and that is why your very own JCM asks the developers where they are right now when it comes to compatibility.

This month we interviewed Chetan Madaan from Joomdev, the people behind numerous templates and extensions, including the popular Astroid Framework.

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