Community Magazine

The JCM Team is proud to present you the December Issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

Last month, as the start of a new series, we introduced ourselves, the Joomla Community Magazine Team. This month we have the pleasure to get to know the CMS Release Team, the people who make sure every new release of Joomla goes as smoothly as possible. Pleased to meet you, CMS Release Team!

In the first part of this series I described why tuning the performance of your site is something you should do for both philosophical and practical reasons, as well as where to start. That post was by necessity a bit generic. In the second part of this series we'll dive into some of the basic things you can do in Joomla to unlock a decent amount of performance.

Yes, we all love the Joomla core and all the possibilities that come with it. But for Søren Beck Jensen, the beauty of Joomla lies in the extendibility. Joomla follows a predictable development pattern, which makes it very suitable for complex projects that need custom (extensions) development. In this issue, Søren tells us how every core feature and functionality can be extended, and along the way provides us with some useful tips on how to do it.

In the April issue from the Magazine we had an article about putting blocks of content on a website using modules. In this article we will focus on the module parameters and how to use them to modify the layout from modules.

I managed to meet Ryan Demmer at the virtual water cooler on a cold morning in early December, and quickly asked him a few questions about his experiences migrating the very popular JCE Editor to Joomla 4. Read on, for valuable advice, from a very experienced Joomla extension developer.

The Joomla 4 Dashboard has a lot of options. Which is great, except when you see it for the first time. For people new to Joomla, it can be confusing to see all the things you can do. Where should you click to create new content? To upload an image? To do other things? If you build a website for people not used to working in the Joomla backend, you can make it a lot easier for them by customizing the Dashboard.

Those familiar with Superhero movies and comics will know the world is divided into two camps: Marvel and DC. The Marvel superheroes such as Iron man and Captain America, and the DC ones such as my own favourite, Batman.

The JCM Team is proud to present you the November Issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

Joomla 4 is a major improvement over Joomla 3. Right out of the box you get a very fast CMS with built–in support for structured data (what was formerly called “microdata”), even several caching options to cater for any use, from lightweight persona sites to massive, busy portals.

Open any website - where do you look first? In most cases you will first see a beautiful photo or graphic and with the next glance you will look for a menu with links to more pages.

With the change in Google’s site rating and ranking criteria, the reasonably new “Web Vitals” measurements have generated new interest in a variety of caching technologies to improve content delivery times in the never ending race to the elusive “100% across the board” and satisfactory search engine indexing results.

As we all know or experienced first-hand, the Joomla 4 Dashboard can be pretty overwhelming if you’ve never seen it before. The good news is: it doesn’t have to be. The Dashboard is very customisable, and more and more website designers decide to create beautiful and easy to use custom Dashboards for their clients (or for themselves). Jeroen Moolenschot, for instance, made a custom Dashboard module to add quick icons for much-used functionalities… and decided to share it with the whole Joomla community.

Within the Joomla organization, quite a number of teams are working on all sorts of projects. We at the Joomla Community Magazine are really curious about what each team is doing, who’s in it, how they work together, what the people are like and how all of us can help them. What better way than asking them? And since there are so many teams, we thought we’d make a series out of this, starting with our own team: the JCM. So if you’re as curious as us: pleased to meet you!

In a community-led Project, it's crucial to collect feedback, comments and proposals from all the volunteers and shape the strategy and the direction accordingly. And if this is really easy for what concerns the "software" being completely Open Source and available to anybody who wants to submit a Pull Request or propose a Request for Comments, the same it's not so immediate when it comes to the organization, the teams and the leadership.

It’s been a few months now since Joomla 4 came out, and all over the world people are building websites with it. As you may know, Joomla 4 has a number of great new features. In this issue of the Joomla Community Magazine long time Joomla user Chris Wilcox tells us about his favourite: the Media Manager, that enables content managers to edit images in the backend of their Joomla website.

Many companies use Joomla as the basis for their business. It's in everyone's interest to make Joomla work well. So Work4Joomla, allowing staff to work on Joomla and improve Joomla while at work is an initiative to do just that.

This month we are glad to interview David Opati Aswani. He is at his second term as the Events Department Coordinator, the department in Joomla that works with Joomlers across the globe to spread the word about the project through local events, groups, activities, seminars and much more.

Spoiler alert: there is a challenge for you at the end of this article and if I get enough answers there will be an ultimate article about Custom Fields in the Magazine.

Dear friends, on November 2^nd 2021 our Vito Disimino, precious Vito, left us at only 63 years old. He had an incurable disease with which he fought to the end. We are all heartbroken, he was a trusted friend even before he was a colleague, a valuable Joomler, a great Leader.