Why we don't publish everything

At the Joomla Community Magazine, we aim to provide content that informs, connects, and benefits the community as a whole. And even though we’re a magazine by the community, for the community, we won’t publish everything that’s brought to us. Here’s why.

Sometimes - not very often - it's suddenly there: that moment we have to tell an author their article won't be published. There can be a number of reasons for not publishing an article.

The information in the article is incorrect

We’ve had authors downplaying security risks or promoting unsafe practices, authors advising our readers not to update their website for various reasons, and authors providing information that’s wrong. You might be thinking: I never read any of that in the magazine, what is she talking about? Good. I was hoping you’d think that, because we don't publish articles like this.

Of course every author is responsible for their own text, but this is the Joomla Community Magazine, an official Joomla publication, and we really don’t want to make Joomla look bad. 

The article is damaging Joomla and/or its community

Problems do crop up from time to time in every community. Working together as a team doesn’t always run smoothly (unless, of course, it’s the JCM team 🙂). Sometimes, members of a team that’s not functioning well, try to find a bigger audience by writing articles about what’s going wrong in their team and who’s to blame for this. Or they're disagreeing with decisions made by leadership and are looking for a way to vent - or even broadcast - their discontentment.

Understandable. However, this is the internet we’re talking about. You know, the place where nothing ever goes away. Problems usually get solved, but your article isn’t going anywhere. Again: not good for Joomla, so we won’t publish.

The article is an advertisement

The JCM guidelines state we don’t allow commercial advertising in articles. So an article clearly telling us to buy something, that’s a no-brainer: we don’t publish that. 

But what about advertising for free services or products? The rule there is we won’t publish articles advertising services or products not fully compliant with the GPL license.

We also don’t publish articles that are considered to be self-promotion, although this is much harder to judge. Usually in such cases we ask the author to make their content more interesting for a broader audience. For example: we don’t want to know how successful an author is and how happy their clients are with the solution provided, we want to know the process behind the solution, the challenges, the steps they took to make the project a success (so we can learn from this and become just as successful ourselves). 

The article is not newsworthy

The Joomla Community Magazine is there to provide you with meaningful and interesting stories. If we think an article is too specific and therefore lacks relevance to the broader community, we choose not to publish it. The same goes for articles that are too general. 

If the topic is good and the article has potential (just not in its current form), we will always offer to help the author make their article more suitable for our readers. An article describing a very specific use case, for example, could become more interesting if you add more scenarios in which your solution could shine. An article that’s too general, could benefit from real life examples of what it describes.

What we do publish

We do, of course, welcome articles that share knowledge, highlight collaboration, guide us through technical challenges, acknowledge contributor achievements, showcase innovative projects and stories that help others learn, grow, or get involved. Do you want to write stories like that? Then please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.!