Joomla! Community Magazine™

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. 

Tampa, Florida is well known for invasions, from snowbirds to pirates, Tampa has been a winter getaway and vacation spot for countless years. Over the past two years, Tampa has also become known as the largest JoomlaDay in North America. The combination of easy access from the Islands, South America, and Europe and a break from the winter cold for our friends in the North has made JoomlaDay Florida a premier Joomla event.

In just three short years JoomlaDay Florida has become the premier Joomla event in the United States and has grown from a single day to the current three-day event that includes workshops and certification. To be honest, it wasn't as hard as expected; the USA has far less JoomlaDay's than Europe and some of the largest have been dormant for the past few years. Still, we are honored and feel blessed to have the support of the Joomla community. As we lead up to our 2018 event, I would like to share with you how we created JoomlaDay Florida!

Happy 2018! We at Joomla Community Magazine wish you a great year and we bring you more great articles in the January Issue.

As we look back upon Joomla in 2017, we can feel a great deal of accomplishment as a community. We have succeeded in so many ways, I would like to mention a few that were significant.

In this new article series, the Joomla Community Magazine Team will interview the leaders of Joomla 4 to better inform our users and extension developers at to what's in store for us in this upcoming major new version. Let's start with George Wilson, Joomla 4 Release Lead.