Joomla! Community Magazine™

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!.

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!.

Someone must have said something bad about Joomla! template clubs last month, because they certainly stepped it up a notch in February.

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.

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.

I wandered into the Joomla! community shortly after the fork of Mambo to Joomla! in 2005. I had no idea what Joomla! was. At the time, I was involved in a huge web-based enterprise project and wondered if something like Joomla! might be an alternative, or even compliment parts of an enterprise system. The commercial system we were building was really expensive. Joomla! on the other hand, had a lot of what the enterprise system didn't have right out of the box. I'd investigated other open source website systems and bulletin boards but when I stepped into the Joomla! community I knew I'd found something special.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

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.

It's still early enough in the year to make some predictions about 2011: dedicated people continue to affirm their willingness to give back to the project, and the project leadership is collaborating in new ways to keep Joomla moving forward!

A Founder Member of Joomla! with an often quoted blog tag-line of 'agree or disagree - I don't care' we turn the table on Brian Teeman with a 5 minute interview, a format he successfully uses on his own award winning blog. From achieved childhood hopes he has become a 'Man of Joomla!', a counsellor, advisor and an advocate with a passion for fairness and our Joomla! Community.

Joomla! is a volunteer community. And, within that community, people come, people go, people stay. With each new arrival or departure, there are opportunities for change. Inspiration. A new direction, or a different way of looking at things. The changes may be subtle, or a total in-your-face-whammy. You, the User/Developer/Designer, may see it, or you may not. But know this... Change is inspiration, and, like the wind, it can go in many directions.

At the end of last year I was thinking what I could do to spread the word about the new Joomla! 1.6 and the result is the free Joomla! 1.6 - Beginner's Guide, that I have written. It has 174 pages and covers all the things which are important to know and a few others, too.

Matt Lipscomb is a member of the Community Leadership Team (CLT), Co-Manager of the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED) and the Joomla! Resources Directory (JRD). In his day job he is Creative Director for USA Freelancers, a Joomla! web design team.

In the space of five days in January, I found myself catapulted into Joomla! gatherings around the globe in some unexpected ways. All of them left me feeling grateful for this wide and wonderful community, and marveling at technological advances, as we all celebrated the launch of Joomla 1.6

Unless you've been stuck under a REALLY big snowdrift, hopefully you're aware that Joomla! 1.6 was released on January 10, 2011.  Over three years in development, this new version adds many important features, lays a new architectural foundation for future releases, and starts us down a new path of time based release cycles. Joomla! 1.6 marks the beginning of a new era for our project. Here is a story about how our community worked together to announce this new era to the world...

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.

On January 10, the Joomla! leadership and community celebrated the healthy arrival of version Joomla! 1.6, weighing in at a strapping 8MB. January has been a month of celebration, as a new era is born!

One of the biggest challenges facing Joomla! 1.6 is the lack of a clearly defined migration path to get from Joomla! 1.5 to 1.6. No More! With the brainchild of one Joomla! developer, and the willpower of the Joomla! community, the ability to easily move your site to Joomla! 1.6 with just a few simple clicks is becoming a reality! We caught up with that developer, Matias Aguirre, to get his take on the development of the jUpgrade component and the community efforts to make it a success...

Joomla!’s temporary off-line mode is a very handy option to temporarily take your site down while performing maintenance —e.g. updating the Joomla! core or an extension— and is even suggested by the official documentation for the unfortunate time that your site has been compromised. However, is this really off-line, or are there any pitfalls you should be aware of?