Joomla! Community Magazine™

The Joomla community is made up of passionate volunteers, that truly believe in the idea of Open Source. They invest tremendous amounts of time to improve the CMS, provide support to other users or spread the word of Joomla’s awesomeness – and the better part of those people is completely “Jeck”. Time for you to become a Jeck too, by attending J&Beyond on 11-13 May 2018!

Kigali went live last week as it hosted the sixth edition of the CMS Africa summit. CMS Africa is an organisation that champions the use of technology (open source) to change the way we develop economies. The Summit brings together both global and Africa-based speakers and delegates. It is a premier event that host tech business owners, tech innovators, and experts in the area of web & mobile design, e-commerce solutions, online business, and online exchange. In terms of delegate attendance, the summit attracts web & mobile designers, bloggers, e-commerce & online stores builders.

EU citizens will soon expect that their personal data will by default be processed more carefully, transparently and only for the purposes for which they provided their explicit consent. The General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) introduces many improvements to personal data protection. It doesn’t matter whether the service provider is physically located in EU area or not, or if the provided services are paid or free of charge. If the service is available to people within the EU and personal data is involved, the regulation shall be applied and personal data must be protected according to the GDPR.

Recently we were approached by the Chairpersons of the Carson City Coin Collectors of America. We were told that they most likely would have to shut down their Joomla 1.0.15 website with a Fireboard 1.0.3 forum, as they had not been able to find a Joomla Developer to assist them. Their site urgently needed an upgrade to the latest version of Joomla and a good new forum, without losing any existing forum entries or uploaded images.

On 28 March 2018, the Joomla! User Group Melbourne hosted the first ever Joomla! Certification exam in Melbourne, Australia. We ended up with 7 new Joomla! Administrators, from 8 people who chose to sit the exam (and the 8th who was quite new to Joomla wasn't far off and is keen to try again!). Our JUG went through a bit of a journey together to achieve an excellent overall result, which I thought was worth sharing.

It's April and in the Northern Hemisphere, it is associated with Spring, when flowers bloom. And the Joomla Community Magazine is blooming with yet another great issue for our readers.

An interview with Alison Meeks, Social Media Team Lead and Administrator of the Joomla Facebook Group.

As you may know, Custom Fields were introduced in 2017 with the release of Joomla 3.7.

Many of us are aware of their existence, but not everybody has already realised how powerful these are or had the opportunity to exploit them. The idea of this article is to present a few recent projects which have used Custom Fields. Hopefully this will stimulate many of us to give it a try and to start to play with them.

And I think it is really worth it : Custom Fields bring Joomla to another level.

Rowan Hoskyns Abrahall commenced as new President of Open Source Matters on 25 March 2018. The Joomla Community Magazine had the opportunity to interview her in person during JoomlaDay Florida 2018 in the US. We talked about what she expects from the role, and what we should expect from her regarding the Project. It was informative and FUN (for us, at least)!

Testing code is an important part of software development, and automated testing should make sure that ongoing development doesn’t break existing functionality. Therefore, automated testing is very important in the quality management of our product Joomla!

 Abandonware is a term used for a piece of software that is no longer developed or supported by the original author.  In the Joomla-world, abandonware can include third party extensions such as components, modules, plugins, templates and/or libraries.

This month we find out more about Sandra Decoux, the Marketing & Communication Department Coordinator for Joomla.

Nowadays, due to the advances of information and communication technologies in conjunction with the so-called social web, the amount of personal data that users are sharing publicly is continuously increasing. We are witnessing the phenomenon of the development of an online "heaven" of personal data sharing that can be potentially transformed to a personal "hell" for any individual or company. At the same time, cybercriminals are becoming even more sophisticated and malicious users can in many ways track and/or spy other users at their online activities.

As the seasons change, with cooler weather signalling the end to a very hot and dry summer here in Cape Town, and the Spring Equinox in Northern Hemisphere is upon us, we look forward to some of the larger Joomla events of the year.

Every few months, it's a good practice to perform a search engine optimization (SEO) audit of your website. Even if your traffic and sales are doing well, there may be issues that you can uncover that will lead to more traffic and sales. And, if your website's search engine rankings have changed recently, doing an SEO audit is imperative. In this article, we'll do some searches at Google to begin an SEO audit.

Over the last decades, the web has become significantly more social and made communication among companies and users much easier. At the same time, terms such as “privacy” were in many cases underestimated because of the abundance of public shared personal data. Users are dynamically contributing to the content production of the web, and they often get involved in a “game” where their personal data becomes the actual product. It is not unusual for a user to misunderstand that his personal data is information that could be publicly shared without any special protection.

In some countries around the world, February is the month Valentine's Day is celebrated and love is in the air. And this love is represented this month with several great articles from the authors in the Joomla Community.

Our first real official Joomla Day NYC was in 2008 in Google. In 2009, I coordinated the first JoomlaDayNYC in a 'paid space'. This event was in a small space that most of us called the 'chachkie' space. If you were there you will know what I mean! In the front entrance, you saw little trinkets, etc. At the same time, almost 200 people met and worked on Joomla. It was an exciting weekend for all involved. We met people from other countries, focused on Joomla, and had a ton of fun!

The Joomla World Conference 2017 in Rome was a great moment to discuss the future of the project, which... surprise… will, for the most part, have a big "Joomla 4" stamp on it. In the context of the conference, I was invited to participate in the Marketing Sprint, kicking it off with a full day of meeting with the leaders and members responsible for the launch of the Joomla 4 marketing campaign. Together we brainstormed and discussed ideas, reviewed predictions and adjusted expectations to better fit realistic goals.

The Joomla 4 Interview Series brings this month Allon Moritz, the New Media Manager Team Lead. We got to know a little about him and what to expect when managing media in the upcoming Joomla 4.