2008-07 Joomla! Community Magazine

Recently, there have been amazing numbers popping up at Joomla!. The 5,000,000th copy of Joomla! was downloaded from JoomlaCode (which launched March 14, 2007). The 300,000th Joomla! Forum thread was created. We are very close to welcoming our 200,000th forum member. Certainly, these are encouraging signs that Joomla! is useful to people all around the world.

Those heavily involved in the Joomla! community know who Anthony Ferrara (aka ircmaxell) is, but most of you probably have no idea. Besides being the Joomla! Member of the Month for June 2008, Anthony is also the Joomla! Bug Squad Team Lead and on the Development Team. He is one of the fine folks that work on the Core code base that we all love.

The Joomla! Extensions Directory (other wise known as "The JED"), gets an average of 10 new listings submitted every day. It's easy for good extensions to get lost in the shuffle. This column will attempt to highlight the GPL extensions that are worth a second look.

If you look at the Web site of Joomla!, you will find many, many people talking to each other. Most of them have unusual names, such as mastermind, osokin, speedbit or many, many others. Actually there are about 200.000 names registered - but come on, these names are not real, or are they?

On May 30, the second Pizza, Bugs and Fun event was announced. We extended this event over two weekends at the request of community members unable to attend earlier. During the first weekend, there were 15 people, or so, idling in the IRC channel all the time. A lot of great discussion went on and three participants joined the Joomla! Bug Squad. During the second weekend, even more people participated.

Open Source CMS became important part to user group in Thailand just recently. Even it is considered new technology for Thai users, during the part 5 years, the growth rate is very consistent. There are more and more users and enthusiasts, therefore more growth will be expected each year.

The Introductory: Modify Joomla! 1.5 Milkyway Template is the basic changes usually requested by beginners. You will learn to change the Joomla! logo, change the template width, choose from existing color schemes, and remove the footer link that will take site visitors back to Joomla.org. In addition, you will learn how to change the Joomla! Logo to something appropriate for your use and how to create your own favicon, replacing the one that came with Joomla!. Let's begin!

Joomla! has recently released a new version, 1.5. With this new version a new task arises for website administrators maintaining Joomla! 1.0.x websites: migrating to the new 1.5 version. But, do they really need to migrate?

Joomla! 1.5 has really taken hold in recent months, overtaking 1.0 to become the more popular system. The aim of this post is to compare the URLs in 1.0 and 1.5 so that you know what to expect in the new version.

The localization possibilities in Joomla! 1.5 try to force an open door: not only the components, but the interface of the modules, plugins and templates can have multilanguage support. It is wonderful and important at the same time. Wonderful, because your extension has got the chance to be able to be used by users not speaking English. Important, because it tends to spread Joomla! 1.5 all over the world and provides weighty arguments for those who hesitant in upgrading.

A lot of people come to Joomla! with an existing LDAP provider in mind, typically Microsoft Active Directory, Novell eDirectory, Fedora Directory Services or Apple's OpenDirectory. However, you don't need to have the infrastructure pre-existing to make use of the LDAP extension within Joomla! or with other systems. You can, in fact, build it from scratch.

Amongst the numerous bugs that have been dealt with, there are a few feature improvements that have been made in the recent Joomla! releases 1.5.2 and 1.5.3.

People only need to give the time that they want. If someone wants to help out for 5 minutes per day, all they need to do is login, pick an item, and work on it for those five minutes. Because all necessary conversation is done on the tracker (Joomlacode.org), the need for large time commitments, or complex work flows is gone.

It has been exciting being involved this year with the 2008 Google Summer of Code program. We’ve had the greatest level of participation yet with fifteen funded student projects as well as one student who is doing it for nothing but recognition and a small amount of Google swag.