Joomla! Community Magazine™

Since the dawn of Joomla! around 2005, there has long been a stigma that open source and freely available content managment systems are a ‘poor man’s’ web design tool.

Welcome to Joomla! in the Press/Media. You will find links and short descriptions of where you can read recent articles about Joomla! in the Press and Media.

Have you ever been frustrated with Joomla!’s linear approach to templates? I’ve developed several web applications in Joomla! where it would have been useful to be able to include a template inside of another template – an internal menu system, a special footer for specific components, etc – and in the past I’ve gotten around this limitation with good old fashioned PHP include statements. While this method works we can have much prettier and more maintainable code by extending Joomla!’s JView class to support this functionality.

The Joomla! project has won numerous awards such as Best Linux/Open Source Project, Best CMS and more recently being inducted into the CMS Hall of Fame. In contrast, the people who build, develop for, implement and write about Joomla lack an awards ceremony to recognize their contributions and efforts. To fill this gap, the Joomla! Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition awards were created in 2010 at the J! and Beyond conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. The singular power of the J!OSCARs lies in the fact that it is a peer-based initiative: anyone in the community can submit a site, project/extension or person for an award.

Here is an easy and fun way for you to share your feelings about Joomla! with the rest of the community: Simply write a haiku about Joomla! below in the comments area of this month's page. Be sure to check back here to read the haikus submitted by other members of the community. We will have a page for new haikus in every upcoming JCM issue.

Creating software that works is hard work, it takes time, expertise, and experience. After all that hard work the last thing a developer wants to do is spend time answering “silly” questions asked by the users using that software. The best way to fend off most basic questions is to tell users how to use the software – to provide documentation!

March saw more collaboration, and more community involvement. Stay tuned in April when a call will go out for community nominations to OSM board and appointee positions!

Welcome to the source update for April 2011. This is a new column to give you information about what's happening with Joomla! source code.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

A new Joomla! book, Joomla! 24-Hour Trainer, is coming out next month. Its author is Jen Kramer, faculty member and program director of the Master’s of Science in Information Technology program at Vermont’s Marlboro College Graduate School. A long-time instructor, Jen teaches courses in conceptual web design, web applications, and internet marketing, and is also the co-owner of www.4webinc.com, a web development company that specializes in building highly customized Joomla! websites. Joomla! 24-Hour Trainer is Jen’s second book, coming a little more than a year after her first one, Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site.

Perspective is a strange thing, probably best experienced less metaphorically, when drawing still life. The slightest head movement can change how an object looks - it's the same object in the same position, only our perception changes.

Approximately 3000-6000 languages are spoken by humans for thousands of years. The picture shows Cuneiform, the earliest form of written expression. When I see this picture it is not that far away from the design of a website, even the ‘design’ is 5000 years old. The spoken language died out around the 18th century BC, but still today Cuneiform exists in Unicode ( U+12000–U+1236E (879 characters)  ). That means it would be possible to create a Joomla! website in Cuneiform.

Yes, I have heard the rumors. Joomla! 1.6 is out. So why review a book on 1.5? My main two reasons are: 1.) If you want a “production” site working now with a stable version of Joomla! and stable versions of the extensions used. 2.) This book is a great starting point to get into Joomla!. Yes, it is called “Joomla! 1.5 Site Blueprints”, and even author Timi Ogunjobi states that this book is not an introduction to Joomla!, nor an in-depth manual for using Joomla!; but... it's the book I wish I had picked up when I first got started with Joomla!.

As the number of websites worldwide continue to grow at an incredibly fast pace, and the race to be at the top of search engine result pages is getting more and more competitive, SEO optimization is hardly a matter of choice any more. If you want to bring more traffic to your website — and not just any traffic, but visitors who are uniquely attuned to and looking exactly for the services and products that you offer, then take the time to optimize your website — it’s free, it’s easy to do, and most importantly, if you do it right, you can see real and tangible results within several months, or even sooner.

The long awaited Joomla! 1.6 is finally here and has been here for about two months now. Joomla! 1.6 introduced a lot of new changes and improvements and it was released 1084 days or 2 years, 11 months, and 19 days after Joomla! 1.5's release. Joomla! is now on a 6-month release cycle and Joomla! 1.7 is scheduled to be released in July 2011.

As you all know – Joomla!'s page loading speed is not one of the main advantages of the system. Of course, there is some advice you could follow and there are two very important things that needs to be done:

Grab your shillelaghs and shamrocks... and beguile us with your best blarney! This month, we are taking a little side trip from our Haikus and asking for your limericks, written in the spirit of Joomla!.

Not everyone is, or wants to be a programmer. However, you don’t have to be to help find and track down bugs in software. Using a few techniques, you can often get to the bottom of a problem and determine if it is a bug, user error, or something else. Since software development is an ongoing process, you may find yourself wondering when you come across a problem if it is a bug, or not.

Each month Joomla! users around the world gather for collaboration, learning, and good times with Joomla! User Groups in over 50 countries (55 to be exact). Groups range from get-togethers of 8 or 9 people, to meetups of over 40 people! I caught up with the Joomla! User Group in Suffolk, England for this last month's meeting for a good time, and a quick interview. We were able to talk with JUG members and get their thoughts on JUG's and how the Joomla! Community is affecting them.