Joomla! Community Magazine™

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

Are you a developer who needs to know when you can expect deprecated old functions, an administrator who may have new features to gem up on, or perhaps just nosy and wants to know when the next release is due? Then read on and get the inside knowledge.

There is a place and a time for everything. The current trend is to use Generative AI and LLM (large language models) for everything, but we're not there yet. Although technically inaccurate I will refer to this as AI throughout this article.

In a world where digital landscapes are ever-evolving, it's easy to take the thriving communities within them for granted. But what happens when we neglect the very foundations that sustain us? Just as the once-abundant passenger pigeons vanished from our skies, the vibrant Joomla community risks fading into obscurity without our collective vigilance and support. As I shared at JoomlaDays NL 2024, the story of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, is a powerful reminder of our shared responsibility. Every one of us can play a crucial role in ensuring Joomla’s enduring success.

Exciting News for Joomla Volunteers!

The wait is over, and I am thrilled to announce that Holopin is ready to launch! If you've been contributing to the Joomla Project in 2024, your efforts are about to be recognised in a fun and meaningful way. Instructions on how to claim your digital badge will be winging their way to you ASAP.

Over the last few weeks I have been rebuilding a joomla website that was built with a pagebuilder using just core Joomla and the core Cassiopeia template. This wasn't for a client, it was just as an exercise to satisfy my own belief that you don't need a pagebuilder.

When it comes to building your website in Joomla 5.x, you have a few options as mentioned in Episode I, you could use the built-in template of Cassiopeia, custom fields, tags etc and opt for the great built-in option: Joomla's Built-in Content Templates Page Builder, as presented in the article by Brian Teeman or like so many of us, you could opt for one of the Template Frameworks and possibly Visual Page Builders that exist… (for a reminder on those, check out May’s Episode I where I set the groundwork for this series).

Finally, after waiting for a year we could enjoy another JoomlaDay in the Netherlands! We had online meetings for a few months, and got our program set, and our visitors and presenters were back!

Maybe you’re using one already, maybe you’ve heard of them: no-code automation tools like Zapier, make.com and IFTTT. These tools are a way to automate tasks without using any code: define a trigger and an action and you're good to go. Wouldn’t it be übercool if you could have that for your Joomla website - oh wait, you can: Ane Miren Alvarez created a Joomla automation for make.com. Find out all about this!

Joomla 5 was released back in October 2023 and after some 8 months of being out in the world, it is definitely the best version of Joomla and probably any CMS that is out there… (I can hear the pros/cons arguments already) 

Do you have pages with a lot of content, or do you want to create a page where the visitor can decide for themselves which info they’d like to see (like an FAQ page)? An accordion is perfect for that. The visitor gets an overview of the topics, clicks on the interesting ones and the content gets revealed. And the good part is: you don’t need an extension for this, you can do it with a little tweaking - creating an override - of one of Joomla’s core views. Here’s how you do it!

A few years ago, I had the chance to meet Troy and during one conversation we had, he introduced me to a project he was working on: Bearsampp. I develop primarily under the Windows environment, which I have grown accustomed to from working at previous companies. I create numerous instances of Joomla for testing and for actual projects, therefore a reliable local server environment is critical. Bearsampp sounded interesting, and, even though I was all set (I thought), I decided to give it a try.

Among the extensions that Joomlers have become accustomed to installing as standard on their sites, JCE is generally at the top, and has been for years. Users are so used to it that they forget that behind this editor is a developer who has devoted 20 years of his life to providing a quality tool. Let's meet Ryan Demmer, the proud father of JCE (Joomla Content Editor)