Joomla! Community Magazine™

The Dutch Joomladays are a continuing success since April 2006. Hundreds of Joomla! users and professionals have attended the annual event since then. On the 2nd and 3rd of April 2011 many Joomla! users, developers, professionals and community members did travel to a central location in the Netherlands to attend the Dutch Joomla!days.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

One of the things that tends to grab my attention browsing sites is the creative use of dates. It's not always appropriate, or even necessary, to get creative with date styling and in most cases, it is only relevant for blogs and perhaps even then, blogs written by creative people. But nonetheless, I love it when a designer puts an elegant or flamboyant touch into the design of their date elements.

The CMS Expo is one of the only conferences in the world that brings together many of today's top Content Management Systems under one roof. With more than 60 professional speakers and over 100 learning sessions scheduled over the 3-day event, May 2-4, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois, you can find information and training from some of the CMS industry's top professionals without sitting through an infomercial or someone selling their services on stage.

John and Linda Coonan are the event organizers and are avid Joomla! Community members themselves, through their work with the Chicago Joomla! Users Group and their annual CMSExpo Conference each year. We had the chance to sit down with John Coonen and ask him about the Joomla! powered CMS Expo website.

April showers wouldn't bring May flowers without a little help from OSM.

Unfortunately, I am not able to attend 2011 CMS Expo, USA (May 2-4) which seems to be a highly anticipated event in the fast-growth CMS Sector, and usually I write articles after attending a conference and not in advance, but in the Joomla!sphere, everything is a bit different these days. I assume many people will come directly from the CMS Expo to Europe for a truly unique event:

With so much happening in the Joomla! Community these days with all these brilliant people working on the new Joomla! Framework Project, and the geniuses adding great new features to the Joomla! CMS, I wanted to take a quick minute and highlight a crucial area of the of the Joomla! Project that everyone can help with, even folks like me who are pretty much useless when it comes to programming!

Last month, the 2011 Joomla! draft budget was published and community feedback on it was invited. I believe this was the first time that community feedback was invited before our project's budget was formally approved.

Here is an easy and fun way for you to share your feelings about Joomla! with the rest of the community: Simply write a haiku about Joomla! below in the comments area of this month's page. Be sure to check back here to read the haikus submitted by other members of the community. We will have a page for new haikus in every upcoming JCM issue.

The Joomla! Setup is a series of interviews with developers in the Joomla! community, talking about the tools they use to get the job done, inspired by the setup. Can you tell who it is?

Since the dawn of Joomla! around 2005, there has long been a stigma that open source and freely available content managment systems are a ‘poor man’s’ web design tool.

Have you ever been frustrated with Joomla!’s linear approach to templates? I’ve developed several web applications in Joomla! where it would have been useful to be able to include a template inside of another template – an internal menu system, a special footer for specific components, etc – and in the past I’ve gotten around this limitation with good old fashioned PHP include statements. While this method works we can have much prettier and more maintainable code by extending Joomla!’s JView class to support this functionality.

The Joomla! project has won numerous awards such as Best Linux/Open Source Project, Best CMS and more recently being inducted into the CMS Hall of Fame. In contrast, the people who build, develop for, implement and write about Joomla lack an awards ceremony to recognize their contributions and efforts. To fill this gap, the Joomla! Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition awards were created in 2010 at the J! and Beyond conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. The singular power of the J!OSCARs lies in the fact that it is a peer-based initiative: anyone in the community can submit a site, project/extension or person for an award.

Welcome to Joomla! in the Press/Media. You will find links and short descriptions of where you can read recent articles about Joomla! in the Press and Media.

Creating software that works is hard work, it takes time, expertise, and experience. After all that hard work the last thing a developer wants to do is spend time answering “silly” questions asked by the users using that software. The best way to fend off most basic questions is to tell users how to use the software – to provide documentation!

Here is an easy and fun way for you to share your feelings about Joomla! with the rest of the community: Simply write a haiku about Joomla! below in the comments area of this month's page. Be sure to check back here to read the haikus submitted by other members of the community. We will have a page for new haikus in every upcoming JCM issue.

March saw more collaboration, and more community involvement. Stay tuned in April when a call will go out for community nominations to OSM board and appointee positions!