Community Magazine 
Up until the early 2020s I had a site loaded with so many components, plugins and templates that it became impossible to maintain. I relied heavily on one particular battleship-like suite of components and a particular complementary framework. All subscription models, mostly paid and a few free ones thrown in for good measure. When the large component
developer started quietly exiting the Joomla ecosystem I realised how delicate the whole construction was.
What I realised, ever so slowly, was that there was a seismic disconnect from core Joomla. Components were building what felt like their own very special parallel universe, alongside another created by the templating framework I was using, and the whole thing was starting to lean.
The sad part was that in many ways I was just afraid of some of the core concepts such as ACL permissions. Every few years I would open the documentation, read some of it and panic. No disrespect to the wonderful people who take the time to write documentation like this but personally I am the kind of person who needs context to understand something and a web page with what looks like hundreds of settings throws a spanner in my brain.
Here is something about me. I was an authorised Apple trainer for a decade and had to teach a very complex program over and over again across the course of five days. The course dictated that I go through all the settings before getting into the actual hands-on edit. Set an in, set an out and get your clip into the timeline. Repeat and rinse.
Which was what people had really come to the course for. And honestly I cannot blame them for having a brain overload and really struggling to get past day one of a five day course, time and time again.
But returning to my journey and my completely out of control creaking Joomla site which was increasingly becoming more like the Leaning Tower of Pisa by the day, I needed to go back to the drawing board and start out again with a more solid foundation. Because in the words of the Mad Hatter from the 1951 Alice in Wonderland film "Don't let's be silly." I
did not realise all in one dramatic moment. In many ways I got the wrong end of the stick first. I realised that my template framework of choice was becoming irrelevant as the components it played ball with were slowly stagnating.
Enter Astroid
I remember what first caught my eye with respect to Astroid Framework. It was covered in a YouTube video where someone was doing a fly through of some of the great Astroid functionality with the focus very much on different ways that you can enhance the presentation of articles. I guess in many ways window dressing but it just seemed to make a lot of sense to me.
Flag articles as video articles or articles with a gallery whatever. In many ways in retrospect the tip of the iceberg.
I got the Astroid framework installed on a local server environment shortly after Sonny took over at the wheel and started playing with the framework. True to form I was attracted initially to changing the colour of different parts of any given page and found it fascinating how easy it was. I made some progress with the whole drag and drop system that came with Astroid integrated.
A simple example being in the EU we had new laws about having specific menu items in a specific place telling visitors to the site what their rights were. Getting this menu item set up was a breeze. Previously I struggled and had support tickets that went on for weeks just to achieve this simple change. Yes I had spent most of my time in Joomla avoiding code and relied heavily on paid subscriptions to get things done.
The Wall in my head and the Community
But then I hit a wall. It was the built in mega menu that broke me as I just could not get my head around it. And then I reached out to the Astroid community. It was one of my first ventures outside the closed paid subscriptions forum and I was nervous. Posted and waited and waited.
I think I had one thing going for me and luck on my side. What I had going for me was that if I had learnt anything from what I am just going to call hundreds of support tickets I had written in a plethora of paid subscription forums it was how to pose a question. The other aspect was that a Joomla veteran who spent a lot of time in the Astroid forum, Chacapamac, saw my cry for help and was very patient with me and tried to understand first what I was not understanding and then went to a lot of trouble to break things down with screenshots.
The combination of my forum posting skills and Chacapamac's patience opened the door for me to the Astroid community. I know that this is not the experience that everyone has but this was a kind of happy chain of events that helped me pluck up the courage to stop paying for support and try and go out on a limb. I soon realised that this works on an
unwritten mutual understanding of you help me out and I help you out.
Going All In
When the lead developer at Astroid asked for someone to make videos in a forum post I thought I can do that and set about doing so. The thing is because Astroid integrates so seamlessly with core Joomla it is completely unforgiving. If you do not understand Joomla you do not have a chance of understanding Astroid.
So I set about to finally look core Joomla in the eye and wrap my brain around it through the lens of the Astroid Framework. And I have not looked back since.
Today I was working on video 45 for my channel and was recording a rough voice over where I explained how the standard Joomla layout works with the extended Astroid layout on a category list menu item basis. I was talking about the leading articles versus intro articles settings in the standard Joomla blog layout tab and how this dovetails perfectly into the extra Astroid blog options.
The Asteroid and the Sun
And then it hit me. It is almost as if Joomla is the sun and Astroid is an asteroid rotating around it. It made me appreciate once again how seamless the integration is. Astroid bends to every whim of core Joomla.
One word. Respect.
These days I am very much interested in breaking component dependency as much as possible. Not because I find components bad as such but because even the best component going end of life is no longer any good. And the more components you have the more variables you have and the more points of failure there are.
Joomla has been going now for over 20 years. I have been toying with it for at least 10 years and since I started working with Astroid hand in hand with Joomla things have got more serious. In many ways I came at this whole endeavour backwards but somehow it just feels as if everything is on course or at least almost.
Is Astroid perfect? Not by any stretch. Astroid too has had its ups and downs and there are no guarantees but then there never are. All I can say is that through my unique skill set I have connected with some of the most amazing people I have ever met online.
In an absurd twist of fate I am even tagged as a collaborator in the Astroid GitHub forum and to date I cannot really write code to save my life.
Joomla seems to have had some very meaningful updates recently that are filling some of the spaces that at least one of the components from my old setup was trying to fill in a genuinely very cool way. And Astroid's presentation layer rounds everything off perfectly.
I am writing this article in my second brain Obsidian in the middle of a heat wave in Europe, and it feels like a great time to be alive. Tools are evolving at a ridiculous pace. Even the old blue elephant MAMP is getting some very interesting updates these days! My brain is still largely intact and I have not forgotten how to write. It feels as if a lot of things are falling into place!
Put simply the Astroid Framework rocks. I think it has genuinely earned more attention in the Joomla community, if only because of the absolute respect it has for core Joomla. I for one will be doing everything within my power to push the strengths of Astroid and that is why I am coming out today as a long time Joomla user basking in the sunlight on possibly the coolest Astroid in our tiny little universe.
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