Joomla! Community Magazine™

August 17, 2023 marks an historic date for the Joomla project: after more than 10 years, the project’s support for the 3.x version comes to an end. However there are still plenty of 3.x sites in the wild, some of them unable to migrate to 4.x in the remaining time frame. Do these sites need to be switched off in a couple of weeks?

Have you ever heard the story of the ancient city Troy? It had massive walls, keeping attackers outside and the city safe. However, the greek army, attacking the city, had a genius idea: they pretended to stop their attack and travel back home, while leaving a gift for the people of Troy: a huge wooden horse. The people of Troy were thankful for that gift and pulled the horse inside the city's walls - not knowing that greek soldiers have hidden themselves in the horse, crawling out at night, opening the doors for the rest of their army and thereby dooming the city.

When our team kicked off organizing an international Joomla conference in May 2020, we had no idea that a global pandemic would ruin all our plans. However, as a community born in the online world, nothing seemed more obvious than turning our beloved family meeting into an online event, bringing people from around the globe together in these crazy times.

After JandBeyond, the international Joomla conference, took a break in 2019, finally having a JAB on the horizon again in 2020 was an extremely enjoyable thought.

The Joomla Security Strike Team, JSST, is working tirelessly to keep the Joomla CMS secure and protect the millions of sites around the globe that are based upon it.

Joomla Security Team Sprint, Cologne, May 2018. I guess we all agree that it's one of Joomla's key priorities to offer a software that is as secure as possible, as this plays a crucial role in the user's experience running Joomla - a hacked user, is a very unhappy user.

Today the first "Christmas Market" in my hometown opened its doors – and each and every year that's the time when I realize, that another year is almost over. 2014 was a very successful year for Joomla – and I want to show you what the CMS-Garden has contributed to this success.

From March 10 - 14, CeBit, the world's largest IT fair opened its doors in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT is by far the most important IT related fair in Europe and also has a big international impact, which is underlined by the fact that this year’s CeBIT was visited by people from more than 100 different countries. Like last year, the Joomla! project, represented by a team of well known volunteers from the local community, was part of the CMS Garden booth in Hall 6 at the event.

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. 

During the last years I got more and more involved in the organisation of two large Joomla! events that are hosted by the German Joomla! Association. Those two events, the Joomla!Day Germany and the international Joomla! conference J&Beyond are held once a year and attended by 200-250 people from all around globe, so it seems to be reasonable to call them "quite big". Since this year, I'm basically "in charge" of all things related to the technical realisation and with this post I want to give you a look behind the scenes, share some lessons that I had to learn, and tell you some best practices that developed over the past few years.