Joomla! Community Magazine™

Welcome to the source update for April 2011. This is a new column to give you information about what's happening with Joomla! source code.

A new Joomla! book, Joomla! 24-Hour Trainer, is coming out next month. Its author is Jen Kramer, faculty member and program director of the Master’s of Science in Information Technology program at Vermont’s Marlboro College Graduate School. A long-time instructor, Jen teaches courses in conceptual web design, web applications, and internet marketing, and is also the co-owner of www.4webinc.com, a web development company that specializes in building highly customized Joomla! websites. Joomla! 24-Hour Trainer is Jen’s second book, coming a little more than a year after her first one, Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

Perspective is a strange thing, probably best experienced less metaphorically, when drawing still life. The slightest head movement can change how an object looks - it's the same object in the same position, only our perception changes.

Being given the challenge of styling or restyling a Joomla! site can quickly mean that the erstwhile designer has to don a virtual trenchcoat and fedora to miraculously transform into a code detective. One of the most confusing things for new Joomla! users when it comes to changing a design element on a Joomla! website is trying to figure out where the code for any given style is coming from, and then of course it's another thing to then go and change the style.

NBC Los Angeles called Samantha Farrell "the best singer-songwriter you still haven't heard of," and that had to change. Her solution? A Joomla! website to integrate her music sales, performance schedule, multimedia and blog, made entirely with open source software from the Joomla! Extensions Directory.

Approximately 3000-6000 languages are spoken by humans for thousands of years. The picture shows Cuneiform, the earliest form of written expression. When I see this picture it is not that far away from the design of a website, even the ‘design’ is 5000 years old. The spoken language died out around the 18th century BC, but still today Cuneiform exists in Unicode ( U+12000–U+1236E (879 characters)  ). That means it would be possible to create a Joomla! website in Cuneiform.

As you all know – Joomla!'s page loading speed is not one of the main advantages of the system. Of course, there is some advice you could follow and there are two very important things that needs to be done:

Not everyone is, or wants to be a programmer. However, you don’t have to be to help find and track down bugs in software. Using a few techniques, you can often get to the bottom of a problem and determine if it is a bug, user error, or something else. Since software development is an ongoing process, you may find yourself wondering when you come across a problem if it is a bug, or not.

Each month Joomla! users around the world gather for collaboration, learning, and good times with Joomla! User Groups in over 50 countries (55 to be exact). Groups range from get-togethers of 8 or 9 people, to meetups of over 40 people! I caught up with the Joomla! User Group in Suffolk, England for this last month's meeting for a good time, and a quick interview. We were able to talk with JUG members and get their thoughts on JUG's and how the Joomla! Community is affecting them.

Yes, I have heard the rumors. Joomla! 1.6 is out. So why review a book on 1.5? My main two reasons are: 1.) If you want a “production” site working now with a stable version of Joomla! and stable versions of the extensions used. 2.) This book is a great starting point to get into Joomla!. Yes, it is called “Joomla! 1.5 Site Blueprints”, and even author Timi Ogunjobi states that this book is not an introduction to Joomla!, nor an in-depth manual for using Joomla!; but... it's the book I wish I had picked up when I first got started with Joomla!.

Grab your shillelaghs and shamrocks... and beguile us with your best blarney! This month, we are taking a little side trip from our Haikus and asking for your limericks, written in the spirit of Joomla!.

Someone must have said something bad about Joomla! template clubs last month, because they certainly stepped it up a notch in February.

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.

As the number of websites worldwide continue to grow at an incredibly fast pace, and the race to be at the top of search engine result pages is getting more and more competitive, SEO optimization is hardly a matter of choice any more. If you want to bring more traffic to your website — and not just any traffic, but visitors who are uniquely attuned to and looking exactly for the services and products that you offer, then take the time to optimize your website — it’s free, it’s easy to do, and most importantly, if you do it right, you can see real and tangible results within several months, or even sooner.

I wandered into the Joomla! community shortly after the fork of Mambo to Joomla! in 2005. I had no idea what Joomla! was. At the time, I was involved in a huge web-based enterprise project and wondered if something like Joomla! might be an alternative, or even compliment parts of an enterprise system. The commercial system we were building was really expensive. Joomla! on the other hand, had a lot of what the enterprise system didn't have right out of the box. I'd investigated other open source website systems and bulletin boards but when I stepped into the Joomla! community I knew I'd found something special.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

The long awaited Joomla! 1.6 is finally here and has been here for about two months now. Joomla! 1.6 introduced a lot of new changes and improvements and it was released 1084 days or 2 years, 11 months, and 19 days after Joomla! 1.5's release. Joomla! is now on a 6-month release cycle and Joomla! 1.7 is scheduled to be released in July 2011.

It's still early enough in the year to make some predictions about 2011: dedicated people continue to affirm their willingness to give back to the project, and the project leadership is collaborating in new ways to keep Joomla moving forward!