We all know that volunteering is a challenging decision and time consuming. In the case of Joomla, it can also be very difficult for no tech people and for non native English speakers.

But because Joomla is a benevolent community, nobody will blame you if you don’t or can't volunteer for the project for any reason (timing, language, family, work, etc.). On a personal side, I completely understand as I'm not a developer and I'm also very busy (family, clients, associative engagement, etc.) and days are only 24 hours long.

But if you want to help Joomla despite these obstacles, I may have an easy solution for you. Let me explain why, where and how you can volunteer for Joomla efficiently but without losing your sleep, job, friends and family.

Yes Bill, content is king and that's exactly what this article is about: producing content about Joomla.

Maybe you’re wondering if volunteering for Joomla is your thing. You might be uncertain about your English or your knowledge, or about what would be expected in terms of commitment and time. I get that. I was really hesitant about all these things myself. But I did it anyway, I found a team that suits me, started working, and soon discovered that volunteering can be rewarding in ways I had never expected. And I’m not the only one: in this article, five Joomlers tell us what volunteering brings for them! 

Laura Gordon

As a ‘virtual’ worker it is often easy to feel alone in the world. Volunteering with the Joomla project (in any capacity) gives me connections with people all over the world. It is rewarding to help the project in any way that I can. But more importantly it makes me feel less alone. If I have an issue I have dozens of people that I can ask for assistance. Joomla as a project has given me a career and at the same time Joomla as a technology has given me a community of friends.

Robert Deutz

It's Joomla 18th birthday this month and it's a perfect timing to have a look back about what have been proudly accomplished by all the incredible volunteers over these 18 years.

To celebrate this birthday "all together", here are 18 facts you might probably not know about the best Free open source CMS. There are no order, just some data and facts to enjoy with your cup of coffee (or whatever you prefer) and to share with your friends.

Joomla is used by 2.6% of all the content management system websites. This is 1.8% of all websites.

1,144,205 Joomla sites are live nowadays.

Since 2005, Joomla was downloaded over 140,000,000 times (and counting)!

Joomla is an award-winning content management system with over 20 awards.

Over 75 accredited Joomla language packages are available!

776,003 members registered on the forum have posted 3,310,714 messages!

Joomla has nearly 6,000 extensions available!

Joomla has nearly 2,200 templates available!

Joomla is rated 4.1/5 on Capterra.

Joomla has 4,477 stars of GitHub.

Only 1.9% Joomla sites were infected in 2022.

Joomla 4.3.3 is the 328th release of the CMS.

Nearly 85,000 million-dollar companies chose to use Joomla in 2022.

Nearly 600,000 people visit Joomla website each month.

Top 5 Countries with the most Joomla websites: USA, Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland.

Among the top 1 million most visited sites, 13,362 use Joomla.

2,053 articles have been published on the Joomla Community Magazine since 2010.

Tens of volunteers positions are available at Joomla.

Thank you Joomla!

This birthday is also a perfect timing to thank Joomla from the bottom of the heart for having changed positively the life of hundreds of thousand since 2005.

Thanks to this CMS, we make real friends around the world, we are able to meet incredible people who train and help others for free, we can participate to exceptional conferences, etc.
On a personal note and like thousands others, I have created my tailor-made "Joomla" job that has been making people happy every day since 2014.

Hello Tobias,

After over three years of service your term as Joomla! 3.10 Release Lead is over. What should I say? It had its ups and downs but the stable factor was you. The whole Joomla community was lucky to have you as the 3.10 release lead during this time.

Our Release Lead journey started when I took over the 4.1 releases and you were one of the main people showing me the bits and bytes of how to create successful releases. While I was more the spontaneous and easy going guy you were extremely structured and focused. This mindset has saved some releases, especially the Joomla! 4.0 releases where you discovered at the last minute a major issue. Your knowledge heavily influenced subsequent release managers as you helped set up the current best practice release list. Many weekends we sat together in Google Meets, building pre-releases and thankfully you insisted on sticking to the list each and every time.

You probably were not aware of it, but the fact that Ionos is sponsoring our Pizza, Bugs & Fun events is also your merit. It started with our Hackathon project a few years ago, where we built Joomla! implementation for them and your work paved the way to get in touch with them for further collaboration and sponsorship.

You may have heard of it already: the EU is preparing its Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), a European law about hardware and software. This CRA is coming our way, and it affects Joomla and other open source software. 

In fact, the impact on Free and Open Source Software could be so large and significant that the four major CMS (Drupal, Joomla, Typo3 and WordPress) decided to work together to do something about this. First steps in this collaboration were a joint Open Letter to EU legislators (July 25, 2023) and a joint webinar on August 2, 2023. During this webinar, Crystal Dionysopoulos (Joomla), Tim Doyle (Drupal), Mathias Bolt Lesniak (Typo3), Josepha Haden Chomphosy (WordPress) and Ciarán O'Riordan (Open Forum Europe) explained the CRA, along with their concerns, to their communities (500 people registered for that).  

What’s the idea of the CRA?

The intention of the CRA is to regulate software and hardware cybersecurity in the EU. The CRA wants to protect business users and consumers, by ensuring products in the EU have fewer vulnerabilities, the security process is transparent and clear, and manufacturers are responsible for the cybersecurity of a product throughout its lifecycle. 

Wait a minute, you say ‘manufacturers’?

We’ll come to that later.

AI is becoming part of Joomla with extensions and plugins, but it should also become part of your workforce, becoming your assistant, allowing you to be more productive and taking away some of the day-to-day chores.

In my last article https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/june/ai-extensions-you-can-use-with-joomla I looked at the tools you can use to make images and then a look through the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED), showing several AI products already there. We looked through a few AI tools we can use not just with Joomla but in Joomla, tools that plug directly into Joomla itself.

Now I turn my attention to tools that plug into ChatGPT, tools that extend what it can do and allow you to use that specific tool to help extend it from a General AI tool into a specific and useful AI assistant.

Paid for Version of ChatGPT

At the time of writing, plugins are only available with the paid-for version of ChatGPT, version 4. It has some restrictions; GPT-4 currently has a cap of 25 messages every 3 hours.

Joomla provides us with two Tags modules by default. These are Tags - Similar and Tags - Popular. Let’s take a look and see what these modules can do for us.

In a similar way to categories, we can use tags to organise, or filter, website content. This is especially helpful on larger sites with a lot of content where articles can be grouped together by tags where the content is similar. Luckily Joomla thinks the same way, so the first module we’ll look at deals with similar tags.

Tags - Similar

Tags Similar displays links to other articles with similar tags, simple as that. We can define how similar by using the Match Type setting which gives us Any, All or Half as options.

What does Match Type mean?

The resulting output of this tag filter is usually a list of tags that link to other articles with similar tags. Using the Advanced tab it’s possible to amend the view of this list by changing the module title (if displayed) to a an H3, H4, etc and the module wrapper can be assigned a contextual tag such as aside, details, section, summary, etc.

What’s in store for Joomla 4.4? JCM meets the Release Managers, Allon Moritz and Martin Kopp. Let’s find out who they are and what they like most about Joomla 4!

First of all, thanks for meeting virtually for this interview. I know you Allon through meetings at Joomla Days and your products which I have used, and Martin, from you shadowing the current team and being in the Joomla London meetings that I try to chair. But for those who don't know you, please give us a quick intro.

Allon: Hi. I’m located in the eastern part of Switzerland in the nice Swiss Alps in a small village. When I say small I really mean small: we have around 300 people in the village. I’m the only computer guy doing web development.

I've been involved in Joomla since version 3.7 where I contributed custom fields to the project. Since then I try to help wherever some urgent resources are needed. Currently, I’m in the process of increasing our automated test coverage.

Martin: Hi Philip - First I want to thank the Joomla community for all the opportunities offered to contribute to a great project.
I live in Meilen at the lake of Zurich, 10 km from Zurich Switzerland. I have been running my own company in computer business for over 25 years.