Joomla Community Magazine Authors

Patrick Jackson

Patrick Jackson is a long term Joomla user based in Melbourne, Australia, having used Joomla since it was forked from Mambo in September 2005.

Patrick's currently excited to be deep-diving into what Joomla 4's new features are going to bring to the table, and is familiarising himself with GitHub so he can help with resolving some issues during Bugs & Fun At Home to help get Joomla 4 closer, faster.

A Certified Joomla Administrator, Patrick's been involved in the Australian Joomla community since starting the Melbourne Joomla User Group in 2008, and is currently the Team Leader for the Joomla Volunteer Engagement Team. Reach out to Patrick if you're interested in getting involved with Joomla.

Patrick's company, KPS, specialise in hosting and supporting Joomla websites around Australia, and he's currently working on several projects utilising Joomla and to assist Joomla users with tools to help them make more from the Joomla.

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Articles

20 January 2023

Meet an extension developer: Samuel Marshall JCH Optimize

Patrick Jackson talks with Samuel Marshall, creator of JCH Optimize, a Joomla optimization component that can significantly improve your Joomla website’s performance, on how he got started with Joomla, and where JCH Optimize is headed.

20 June 2022

The Joomla Community Needs more Volunteers

Whether it's a community group in your local area, or a global free and open source software project like Joomla, volunteers are an important resource for any organization. Joomla! In fact, it would not exist without over 750 volunteer contributors to the code base alone, along with hundreds of other volunteers over the past 17 years that have made Joomla what it is today.

20 October 2021

The new metrics for web performance

Joomla 4 performs exceptionally well out of the gate on Google Lighthouse at Joomla Australia's Virtual User Group. Google Lighthouse is Google's open-source, automated tool that gives you feedback that you can use to improve the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, SEO and more.

20 October 2021

Joomla 4 - Where to find documentation

This month in the Joomla 4 series, we take a look at what documentation is available for Joomla 4.

20 September 2021

Can you give some Time4Joomla?

Do you sometimes wonder who the people behind the scenes are putting Joomla together? Most of the time it's users like you who have decided to give a little bit of time - answering a form post, translating some language strings, writing some documentation or perhaps testing some patches. Here's how you can give some Time4Joomla.

17 August 2021

Joomla's L10N-hearted

Localisation is at Joomla's heart. Currently supporting over 75 world languages for Joomla 3, Joomla! speaks more languages than any other content management system. Joomla 4 is launching today with over 20 language packs available. Many more will follow quickly with the community's help.

17 August 2021

Pre-Update Check - Your path to Joomla 4

Joomla 4's now available, but if you're thinking about upgrading from Joomla 3.9, here's some important things to keep in mind before you click the Update button.

17 August 2021

Recruitment, Retention and Recognition

With the release of Joomla 4.0, Joomlers - Joomla's hard-working volunteers - are as important as ever. Whether you're completing an occasional task to support the project, a regular contributor to a team's activities, a member of a team or working group, right through to the various levels of leadership in the organisation, I thank you on behalf of Joomla and look forward to many years of contributions to come.

20 July 2021

Community Openings - July 2021

Since September 2021 each month in the Joomla Community Magazine the Volunteer Engagement Team have been promoting roles that need staffing throughout the Joomla project. We're keen to find people, as well as find out why we're not finding people. Can you help?

20 June 2021

Joomla 4 is on the horizon: The Release Candidate

Earlier this month Joomla 4 Release Candidate was made available, and Release Candidate 2 came out last week. With a fortnightly release schedule for updated RC releases, Joomla 4 is fast approaching the stable release, and you can get involved in the final stages.

20 June 2021

Explore the Core: Controlling User Access

In this month’s explore the core series, we cover Access Control Lists (ACL). ACL are one of the most powerful parts of Joomla’s core, allowing you to give permissions to users to do as much or as little as you want them to while using your website.

20 April 2021

Joomla 4: Customising Admin Dashboards

If you’ve taken a look at Joomla 4 Beta, you’ll have noticed large changes in the layout of the Administration area in the backend of the site. The new Admin Dashboards form part of the restructuring of the Joomla 4 UX and are designed for site managers to optimise their site management experience for themselves or clients quickly and easily.

20 March 2021

Joomla 4: The new Workflow feature

Back in May 2020 when I was writing about the exciting new features of Joomla 4, Workflow had just been merged into the first Beta version that was released a week later. Since then there’s been various improvements made during the beta phase, and with Joomla 4’s release fast approaching, it’s time to look more closely at the new Joomla workflow features.

20 February 2021

Joomla 4: HTML Email templating

Continuing our series introducing new features you’ll find in Joomla 4, this month we look at the improved email template system that allows you to override system email messages, as well as creating HTML templates on your site.

20 January 2021

Joomla 4: Cassiopeia Template

There's a constellation of improvements in Cassiopeia, the Joomla 4 default front-end template.

20 October 2020

Pizza, Bugs & Fun 2020

What would 2020 be without another event that’s run differently? We couldn’t supply pizza to JUGs this year, so participants around the world made their own for PBF20!

20 September 2020

Meet a Joomler: Philip Walton

This month we talked to Philip Walton from the London Joomla User Group. Philip’s also the Joomla CMS Release Team Leader. During COVID-19 he’s been keeping the patch testing process ticking along with Bugs & Fun @ Home, which is how I came to meet him virtually back in April this year.

20 September 2020

Breaking Bad? No, it's Good!

Good bug testing for software projects is about destruction not confirmation. You can easily follow the test instructions for a Pull Request (PR) and show that it fixes the problem it’s designed to fix. But what else might the new code be doing?

20 September 2020

How do I update my PHP version?

Speed, security, compatibility, performance. These are just four of the reasons you should keep your PHP version up to date. In this 2020 revision on the topic, we cover a number of ways you can go about updating your PHP version to avoid problems in the lead up to the release of Joomla 4 which has a minimum requirement of PHP version 7.3 or above.

20 August 2020

Joomla Web Services API 101 - Tokens, Testing and a Taste Test

Joomla 4’s new Web Services API will give you the ability to create a range of new integrations for Joomla.

20 July 2020

My experience with the Beta of Joomla! 4

Joomla! 4 Beta was released during JandBeyond 2020 at the end of May. I reached out to Beta users in the Joomla! Community about what their initial thoughts are.

20 July 2020

Your first project proposal? Do not worry!

A guide on things to consider when writing a proposal as a Joomla freelancer.

20 July 2020

Joomla 4: The new Media Manager

Joomla 4 Media Manager was one of the first features upgraded and incorporated into Joomla 4 at the Alpha stage. Find out what’s improved.

20 July 2020

Installing Joomla! has never been so easy and so fast

Let’s cook up a Joomla! 4 installation!

20 June 2020

Joomla 4: Using the Security Header Features

How secure is your Joomla site? Joomla 4’s new features to manage security headers from within your site make protecting your site even easier.

20 June 2020

GitHub - Installing Git

Contributing to the Joomla project is much easier when you’ve got a local testing environment. This month we’ve prepared a tutorial on how to go about configuring a local testing environment.

20 May 2020

Joomla 4: What to expect?

I’ve been using Joomla since it was Mambo. This month I’ve installed the Joomla 4 “Beta Dev” version and here are a few of the new features you should get excited about...

20 May 2020

Getting GitHub set up for newbies

Looking to contribute to the development of Joomla? Then you’ll need to know about a little thing called GitHub.