this March issue of the Joomla! Community Newsletter!
In this issue, New to Joomla?, GSoC 2025, CMS Critic Awards,
A Glimpse of a Joomler, Showcase of a Website... |
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Are you new to Joomla? Did you know that every 15th of the Month, there is a session just for you?
The "New to the Joomla Community" Session is available to answer your questions. Connect to the community on Mattermost and connect to the
📚 New to Joomla? Start here!
and
be on the look out for:
Joomla 5.3.0 ßeta 2 - coming out Mar. 4th, 2025 and
Joomla 5.3.0 ßeta 3 - coming out Mar. 18th, 2025. |
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A glimpse of a Joomler
Robin Clapp
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What inspired you to get involved with Joomla?
I'm an engineer by training for 13 years doing circuit card design; hardware, software and firmware... I thought website design is something I could do from home while raising my boys. I answered some ads and there was a small company right in town whose owner said: "if you can learn Joomla, I've got a lot of work for you.” He was the only developer and he needed another...
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What have you used Joomla for over the years?
I tend to focus on small business clients, the kind that you would typically find in a Chamber of Commerce or BNI network. I often work on 5 to 10 jobs at a time. However, some projects, are more involved and I’ve been fortunate enough to partner with other Joomla folks to get certain aspects accomplished...
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What are your favorite frameworks, extensions, etc in your building process?
I don't use any Page Builders, I build my own templates. That's how I learned to use Joomla and have continued to do so for 19 years. My graphic designers are amazing and provide me with beautiful layouts to build in Joomla. It is a very customized approach. I’m very consistent in the way I frame and style sites.
As for extensions I always use AdminTools, Akeeba Backup, Convert Forms, Advanced Custom Fields, (I love using custom field, core and sometimes I need a few advanced custom fields)... |
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Community Announcements
GSoC 2025 & CMS Critic Awards |
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The Google's Summer of Code program that has been running since 2005. It exists to promote open-source projects and connect programmers with projects and their communities.
Students and beginner programmers (collectively named GSoC contributors) apply to one of the specific projects that participates in the Google Summer of Code (one of ~ 200 projects).
This year again Joomla has been accepted to participate.
(Joomla! has been invited and participated in 15 of the last 20 years).
Here are Joomla's proposed Project Ideas for GSoC 2025:
Project I: API improvements - Project II: Workflow enhancements
Project III: Weblinks enhancements - Project IV: Joomla! AI framework
More information, available here.
Some important dates:
Feb. 27th: List of accepted mentoring organizations published.
Mar. 24 - Apr. 8th: Applications for GSoC contributors open.
May 8 - Accepted GSoC contributor projects announced.
The full timeline is available here and information on the GSoC program. |
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A yearly event in its 13th year, where CMSs are at the center of focus.
There are 16 unique categories everything from Best Free CMS, to Best AI Solutions in a CMS or DXP and many things in between...
This year, Joomla! was nominated in 3 categories:
Best Free CMS, Best Open Source CMS, Best Enterprise CMS.
and drum roll... 🥁🥁🥁...
Joomla! has won the CMS Critic Award for Best Open Source CMS
CONGRATULATIONS to everyone who
voted and contributes to making Joomla! great! |
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Showcase of a website
www.autobodynews.com
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Autobody News is an online national news outlet for the autobody collision industry. They share autobody news on both the national and regional levels. Autobody News' columnists create original content as well. Body shops can view the latest collision repair news on the website, in a regional monthly magazine, in weekly email newsletters, in bi-annual publications, as well as on social media. They are regarded as a leader in their industry.
The former Joomla 3 site was dated and not mobile-friendly or responsive. While that was the main reason Autobody News decided to redesign the website, it quickly became clear that the user experience could be improved tremendously. Web Design by Robin started the process by evaluating the overall site as it was.
A lot was going on and our team needed to understand how the site was used so that we could make recommendations to improve it. We began by reorganizing the site menu to give the site visitor improved navigation. From there, we added frequently looked for actions in areas that were easy to find. If a website visitor can find what they are looking for easily and quickly, the happier they will be, resulting in higher traffic on the site. Hundreds of articles were pulled over from K2 and added to core for the first launch.
Later we performed the migration to Joomla 4 and 5. So what happens behind the scenes on the back-end? That is where the day-to-day work is done. Many news articles are posted daily at Autobody News and a new set of instructions was created to produce beautiful news article pages. These news articles are SEO friendly, selectable to be featured, listed in multiple categories, and easily searched using the search bar. Images, videos, podcasts and magazine readers are easily added. It’s all native to the website now, which decreases bounce rates. What happens on the back-end is just as important as what the site visitors see and experience on the front end.
I received an email from Robin about a year and a half ago asking if I could assist her with a client that was growing way too fast. I met with the Autobody News team and after discussing their primary goals (speed and improved user experience), I decided to tackle the speed issue (the average page was loading between 7-10 seconds). After replacing many of the 3rd party modules with the core Joomla Articles Category module as well as optimizing the images themselves, we were able to consistently have loadings time of under seconds. This was huge increase in site speed which made the Autobody Team very happy.
Since this website had been around for over 10 years, there were over 1000 articles dating back to 2014 that had broken links or images that no longer existed on the site. Instead of spending countless hours cleaning up articles that were a decade old, I built a custom plugin that scanned the articles before the pages loaded and removed the references to broken images while fixing the broken links by pointing them to the correct core URLs.
These two items alone improved their searchability and overall user experience and in addition to the Autobody News team being thrilled with the results, they had realized that there wasn't anything that couldn't be done with Joomla. We are still working on additional site improvements to continue the Autobody News team's commitment to excellence and improved usability for the website and their subscribers.
Thank you Robin and Adam for the discovery of the process...
The transformation is rather impressive, wouldn't you say:
BEFORE |
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This showcase is presented by Robin Clapp & Adam Melcher. |
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the help of our wonderful volunteers!
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