Supporting diversity is an important tenet for Joomla leadership to uphold. Not only does it improve the quality of work coming out of our project, but as leaders in the Open Source space, it is important that we lead by example. This is particularly true, considering the currently low numbers of women in Open Source, which according to a well-cited study by UCAM at the University of Cambridge, is only 2%

Let me repeat that again: 2% of individuals in Open Source are women. While it is true that the Joomla community seems to be an organic leader in this regard, in that our events and leadership teams are comprised of more than 2% women, we still have a lot of work to do in this area, particularly when it comes to coding. Like most other projects, the percentage of women coders is quite low.

As a result of these and other reasons, the Joomla project will be taking part in GNOME Outreach Program for Women. The program was inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code, and by how few women applied for it in the past. The program is also backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy,

We are Looking for Sponsors!

We are also looking for community sponsors who could donate towards the internship fund since GNOME requires $5,000 stipend for each internship, as well as $500 travel allowance, and $200 administration fee. (The administrative fee will be used to cover intern payments transfer fees and to expand the resources of the GNOME Foundations needed for growing the program.) Our goal is to raise enough money for two internships.

Organizations that sponsor will be able to have their logo listed on the GNOME website and the Joomla landing page for this initiative. 

To Donate:

Please contact Sandra Ordonez, who serves on the Open Source Matters board, at

To Apply:

1) Make sure to read up on the GNOME program: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen

2) You must contribute code to GitHub as part of the application process. https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen

3) Send your cover letter, resume, and link to any code to

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Written by: Sandy Ordonez

Published: 01 April 2013

Effective April 1, 2013 the Joomla Extensions Directory will drop the requirement for index.html files in all folders.

Why the change?

The rule is obsolete and has not been an effective ‘security' measure for a long time. You can read more about it here: http://www.dionysopoulos.me/blog/86-the-files-of-wrath.html

The #1 error with extensions submitted to be listed in the JED is SE1 (missing index.html files) which significantly slows down the approval process for everyone.  Once the error is flagged, the developer has to fix it and then we have to re-screen it. The whole process gets unnecessarily long.

Once we approve an extension for listing it’s generally not checked again, unless there’s an issue reported. It’s quite common for a developer to update his/her extension and miss a few index.html files which will go unnoticed anyway.

What is the alternative?

Check with your hosting providers to see if they have directory traversal disabled.

Utilize the .htaccess / web.config file to prevent directory traversal.   

https://docs.joomla.org/How_do_you_convert_an_htaccess.txt_file_into_a_.htaccess_file%3F

https://docs.joomla.org/Htaccess_examples_%28security%29

You can comment on this blog post here.

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Written by: Matthew Baylor

Published: 31 March 2013

Joomla version 3.1.0 will be released on April 24. This will give us a little more time to test and fine-tune the exciting new tagging feature and also to fix some other unrelated issues.

Version 3.1.0_beta3 will be released on March 29. This will have the same feature set as the final 3.1.0 release. We encourage people to download and try the beta version and provide feedback.

The Tags component will be a great addition to Joomla. It addresses the tagging, labelling, and multi-category requests that have been made over the years. For example, “assign multiple categories to an article” is currently ranked #7 on the ideas.joomla.org site. Tags will address that by allowing you to create lists, blogs, or other layouts that combine articles and other content types any way you like.

An amazing number of people have been contributing to version 3.1, both with coding and testing. For example, over 50 people have helped test and fix bugs just in the past 90 days. If you want to get involved, please consider joining the Joomla Bug Squad.

Note: The above date was updated form April 15th to April 24th. Things are going well, but we just wanted to make sure we're 100% ready and there are a few issues remaining that we want to take care of without rushing it.

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Published: 27 March 2013

Today (Saturday, March 16th)is the gobal Pizza, Bugs, and Fun event. It's an all-day, in every time zone, global event that's open to all virtual participants that are interested.  There will also be local venues wherever they are organized, including at Joomla!Day Boston. The key goal is to fix as many Joomla 3 and Joomla 2.5 bugs as possible before Joomla 3.1's release, which will be on or around the 28th of March, and Joomla 2.5.10's release.

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Published: 16 March 2013

Last week (5-9 March 2013) Joomla was present at CeBIT 2013, the world's largest and most international computer expo in Hannover, Germany. We shared a booth called “CMS Garden” with 12 other open source content management systems (CMS). The idea behind this shared booth was to have all of the relevant open source content management systems all in one place. 

Two of those systems are, just like Joomla, in the top 3 of leading CMS systems: Wordpress and Drupal.

So who won?

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Published: 14 March 2013