Joomla! Community Magazine™

Setting an hourly rate – a topic everyone wants to understand but doesn’t necessarily want to discuss. Too often business owners don’t know how to properly set hourly rates and resort to methods such as guessing or copying a competitor’s rates. However, following these ill-advised procedures can often leave you not charging enough for your services and scared to ask for proper compensation. While there are many strategies for determining your hourly rate, this article breaks down the most widely used approach.

Last week, Open Source Matters welcomed Paul Orwig as the organization’s new President. With years of experience under his belt including stints as Webmaster for the Joomla! Community Portal, lead editor for the Joomla! Community Magazine, and co-manager of the Joomla! Extensions Directory, the new OSM President has an abundance of knowledge to help serve the community efficiently and effectively.

Den Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner's Guide gibt es nun auch in einer deutschen Übersetzung.

Il Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner's Guide ora anche in traduzione italiana.

With leaders who care, milestones reached, and vibrant user gatherings, Joomla! rocks around the world!

When the Joomla Community Magazine launched in July 2010, the Editor's introduction for that first issue included a metaphor for the new JCM and team, which was that of ship built by a crew who longed for the sea. Now, twenty one months later, I am stepping aside from the JCM to better focus on my new role as President of Open Source Matters. I want to share some closing thoughts about the JCM and team, along with a new metaphor for what I think they represent for our project and our community.

2012 is now well underway, and for the month of March 2012, there's four JoomlaDay events to look forward to. As someone who lives at the Southern tip of Africa, I'm happy to see two events from African countries among these! Here's the roundup for this month:

Volunteering to help with Joomla! is fun! Check here for listings of current volunteer openings throughout the Joomla! project that have been posted in the "Help wanted in the community” forum.

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.

Spring is nearly here and that can mean only one thing — it’s J!OSCAR season! At J and Beyond — the developer conference held annually in Europe — the Joomla Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition awards are given to the very best talent in the Joomla community. Today I am proud to announce that nominations for the 2012 J!OSCARs are now open and I encourage you all visit the J and Beyond web site to complete the nomination form.

The German <a href="http://www.screengui.de">Screenguide Magazine</a> asked me to respond to 10 Joomla! prejudices. Here my answers:

This is really true. I have been observing several overseas companies entering into the Japanese Joomla market, but they only last for a year or so. The reason is, they do not follow "When in Rome, do as the Romans!" Please look at the design taste and language. Building Joomla sites may be the same, but there are always some native ingredients included and involved. The overseas Joomla firms do not perceive these native elements.

In February 2010 Google adopted a new strategy that the company's focus is now more on smartphones than on desktops. Eric Schmidt summed this up with a new motto: "Mobile First". Google developers started to create versions of new services for smartphones before creating ones to run on PCs. At that time the global smartphone penetration reached a average of 15% (2009). Two years later, we talk about a global smartphone penetration of 30% (2011). Only in 2011, nearly 500 millions smartphones were shipped.

Now that you have a grasp on the terminology of ACL, let's implement a simple system where different users see different content on a website. To follow along with this example, you should be working with Joomla 1.7 or higher.

The article below is targeting more advanced users, who have some knowledge in HTML and preferably in PHP. We expect that you have knowledge on Joomla! plugin system and template overwrites. Otherwise, it will be very hard for you to figure out how to do it.

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.

Clients grumble too often about a hard-to-use CMS.  The problem, often, is delivering to clients edit screens that are unchanged from how they come out-of-the-box.  We can do better. In this example we’ll be tailoring a complex edit screen into something streamlined for a particular client.  The technique shown here can be applied to any extension and for any client with specific needs.

The brief was to design and build a new online news portal for the offline publication, FTSE Global Markets, with complete SEO best practice, site monetisation and user database leveraging preferences, interest areas and email alerts. Their target audience is Institutional Investors.

With the Joomla! 2.5 release, a new search component has been included to improve the search engine in Joomla! sites. Based on JXtended's Finder, Smart Search is quite the powerful tool and can be used to improve search results and show the user exactly what they want. Out of the box, Smart Search will work for most core data, but third party developers will have to create their own Finder plugins to interact with Smart Search. Not to worry, I'll help you get started with that now!