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August 2008

2008-08 Joomla! Community Magazine

Joomla! Community Magazine - Project

Introducing JoomlaConnect™

Since No News is Never Good News

Written by Amy Stephen

The Joomla! Project is *mighty* proud to introduce JoomlaConnect™ -- a brand-new feed aggregator intended to help share Joomla! news from all around the world! Some of you noticed last month, the old News link in the top menu bar was overlaid with the launch of the Community site. Since No News is Never Good News, we trust this new service will be well worth the wait.

Smoke SignalsThose who have not submitted Joomla! News in the past might be surprised to learn how outdated that environment was. In order to share a news item,  people had to actually visit the Joomla.org site and submit text-only news using a form. Following the submission, the news items sat, waiting until community volunteers made time to manually sift through hundreds of submissions to separate spam from community news.

Maybe our old approach to News wasn't quite as antiquated as using smoke signals, but clearly this system did not scale well with the explosive growth of the Joomla! community. We simply could not keep up. And, as a technology group, we certainly can do better!

With JoomlaConnect, we can hear about Joomla! from many, many sources,  instantaneously, as soon as articles are saved. This will be a great improvement for sharing information and ideas from community members all over the world, regardless of the language used. Check out the Getting Connected to JoomlaConnect information if you are interested in having your feed considered for this new service.

Now, we all know that cool things happen when someone works hard to make it happen. In this case, we need to offer a big community "Thank you!" to Louis Landry, Joomla! Core Team member and Communications Team Lead. Louis has been working hard to create and share JoomlaConnect with us. In fact, for many months now, Louis has been the quiet and active force behind many improvements in communications at Joomla!. He has spearheaded the Joomla.org site clean up and upgrade operation and has helped reorganize and facilitate improved communication for the project, as a whole. Louis - this is simply another in a long list of contributions you have provided the Joomla! community and we appreciate your dedication and generosity, very much. Thank you!

So, out with the old news! And in with the turbocharged, RSS aggregator-powered JoomlaConnect new News! Now, let's get those blogs firing!


6 Comments

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  1. avatar andrew.eddie makes this comment

    2008-08-03 07:08:47

    I think that's a *mighty* impressive resource. It's been really exciting watching it develop behind the curtain (lot's of "this is so cool moments"). Kudos to Louis for pulling all the code together. It rocks man! Certainly a million percent better than the service we were providing.

  2. avatar guysmiley makes this comment

    2008-08-07 02:58:59

    Louis, It seems like there are some people who do just about everything around here - you're one of these unbelievable individuals. Thanks for sharing your great vision! I know it will be a testament to those who would follow in your footsteps.

  3. avatar derred makes this comment

    2008-08-07 11:33:23

    Good news! For first few seconds, I thought it has something to do with Facebook Connect announcement last week. Sort of Joomla + Facebook authentication integration news u know. Anyway, still I enjoyed the news.

  4. avatar Paul M makes this comment

    2008-08-13 22:40:27

    The Joomla connect seems like a great resource and I have it in my feedreader so I can all the news in one place, it appears to be working in that I am getting a lot of Joomla Posts, but 95% of them appear to be in other languages and not enclish. Its getting to the point where I am going to remove the feed. Obviously not everyone can only read english and the fact is available to all languages is great but in this time of info clutter it would be good to only see what is available in my native language. Are there any plans to introduce an option to get the joomlaconnect feed filtered in a particular language? Keep up the good work guys Paul

  5. avatar Paul M makes this comment

    2008-08-13 22:42:51

    Typical, after looking for the feature and not being able to see it, I find it about 30 seconds after my previous post. At least I know my feature has been considered, and added already :) Like I said keep up the good work, I will change my own feed so its only pulling in the english!!!

  6. avatar Randy makes this comment

    2008-08-14 22:02:26

    Will this rss aggregator be available as an extension for the community? Great Work!
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