Joomla! Community Magazine™

Six students, six projects, a lot of codes. Google Summer of Code 2016 has crossed its midterm line. Our students running Joomla! projects are working hard with the support of their mentors and admins*. Will they finish in time? Will their projects bring good results for the Joomla! Project and for the Joomla! users?

In July the birthday of the Joomla Community Magazine is celebrated. In 2016 JCM is turning 6! People from all the corners is invited to celebrate this date. Care to join us?

While Content Management Systems (CMS) reduce the burdens associated with building a website, particularly an e-Commerce one, choosing the right system is a pretty hard decision by itself. The three biggest CMSs every eCommerce entrepreneur has to consider are a pretty popular in the CMS world and eCommerce entrepreneurs usually end up choosing one of them for their website. Joomla takes the cake because of its extensive functionality, ease of use, extendability and its ability to deliver a wholesome online business experience.

My first car was a Geo Metro and to save a couple bucks I would change the oil on it myself. It's not hard to do, however I didn't have any real tools beyond a crescent wrench and a robo-wrench. I would try not to strip the plug in the 6 inches of space under the car using the crescent and then catch the oil in milk jugs that I sliced the tops off of. Then, I would attempt to unscrew the filter with the robo wrench. This had a 50-50 chance of mangling it and spilling oil as I torqued it. These tools made the job a 45 minute trial where I would bloody my knuckles, get covered in oil, and end up cleaning puddles of it off the street. Eventually, I wised up and bought a ratchet set, an oil wrench, and a pan to catch the plug and all that oil.  The difference was magical: it became a 15 minute job without swearing, blood loss, or environmental catastrophes. And it was all because I used the right tools.

In the last 10 years, the internet has evolved at a rapid pace. Completely new ecosystems and markets have emerged on this backbone. The distribution of the userbase of the internet is completely different today than what it was a few years ago. In this article let's explore the impact of this change on content management systems and where things might go from here. 

Thirteen year old Karin Déchamps had a week long internship at redWEB where she got introduced to Joomla. This is her experience with Joomla! Be inspired.

Joomla! is an incredibly powerful system out-of-the-box. Naturally, it can be extended through extensions (plugins, components, modules, templates, languages) to increase its functionality and make the site adapt to your needs. That brings us to one of the most common made mistakes in Joomla! site administration: installing too many extensions. Sure, that one might be handy, and hey - why not add that one too? It's common practice not to install too many extensions, and generally teached. However, from personal experience, this isn't followed too often....

All of us, Joomla! users, expect to have our favorite CMS improved regularly. And we expect too that the updates will bring us just new functionalities and not new errors. To reach this expectations, automated tests run each time that a new change is made in the code to check the basic functionalities.

The challenge is: how to make these tests better?

Let us suppose a new Joomla user, Yash. This article presents a simple idea how Joomla menu item workflow can be simplified for new users such as Yash. As a part of my project for Google Summer of code, I'll be discussing the current menu item workflow in Joomla, its disadvantages and how it can be improved for new Joomla users.

This August I turned 10. That's very young you might say. Sure in human terms of that's pretty young..not even into teens yet. But in software terms..for that's what I am, being 10 is not necessarily that. I am not sure what it is in fact...But I am said to be more or less mature now. But then I have been stable and mature many a times in my life cycle so far...I am a foster child and I have been cared for by hundreds if not thousands of parents and each of them have put a bit of themselves in me. As you might imagine I have grown to have multifaceted personality. For some people I am a simple website building tool, for some a flexible content management system while some see me as a platform to build web applications on. And that's just some of the ways in which people tend to perceive me. Read my complete story!

The set of custom JavaScript libraries in Joomla currently does not have any tests written for it. This summer, as a project done under Google Summer of Code 2016, over 90% test coverage will be achieved over those libraries and this article tells the story of how that is happening.

No one likes to do repetitive tasks when there is a solution to reduce them. I was selected this year on Google Summer of Code to make the life of multi-lingual platform admins easier. The challenge is to change the way Joomla! deals with several components in a multi-lingual platform. It can be performed in a single page in a side-by-side way, instead of being limited to the “new”-”save and close” loop for items referring to the same thing.

The unpublished drafts cannot be shared by using the present system. Hence, the user has to share the draft using external entities or services like cloud (Google drive and Dropbox), physical storage or by simple email. To overcome this drawback the proposed solution is to enable draft sharing using Joomla by making use of a sharable link (as seen in Google Drive/Dropbox). Anyone having this link would be able to view the draft. The basic idea is to enable draft sharing in a Joomla work environment and thus overcome the existing drawbacks and enhance the functionalities of the Joomla! CMS

Many Joomla! website owners/super-users need to know what other users are changing in their website especially at large scale websites with many users and various access privileges. My proposal for the Joomla! project “Recording actions logs, accessible by super admin” in Google Summer of Code 2016 was the one selected. In this article, I explain how I see the project and what would be the outcome of it.

Four years ago at a Joomla Day New York I demoed the latest updates to a Joomla extension I had developed with a client. They had commissioned a Wordpress version of the same extension from a WP developer and shared with me the install stats for both (which connected to the client's service). The installs were overwhelming Wordpress. It blew me away and I began to watch statistics for the popularity of the platforms and discovered that WordPress was devouring Joomla's market share. When I built my first Joomla 1.5 site, more sites on the Internet were powered by Joomla than any other CMS. Today, WordPress powers five times as many websites as Joomla does.

Ninguém gosta de fazer tarefas repetitivas quando há uma solução para elas. Eu fui escolhido para o Google Summer of Code deste ano, para tornar a vida de um administrador de uma página multi-idiomática mais fácil. A ideia é mudar a maneira como o Joomla! lida com vários componentes num ambiente multi-idiomático. Isto pode ser feito numa página só, em vez de nos limitarmos a fazer o ciclo “novo”-”gravar e fechar” para itens associados um ao outro.

At the recent J&Beyond Joomla conference in Barcelona a new SEO team was formed. The team agreed on the following mission statements:

Le J and Beyond 2016 a refermé ses portes sur 3 jours de discussions, de rencontres et d'échanges passionnants et passionnés autour de Joomla!
Naturellement, votre magazine préféré était présent et vous fait revivre cet événement de l'intérieur.

In the Joomla community, we make progress when we work together. At times we differ (and even strongly so) about the best path to take, but we share a goal of improving the Joomla CMS, for all level of users, from all cultures and nations.