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.

At the moment of writing (mid April 2023), Crystal Dionysopoulos has survived her first few weeks as President of the Board of Directors of Open Source Matters (the organisation that powers Joomla). We at the JCM are very curious about our new president: what is she like, what will she bring and how can we all help her move Joomla forward?

Congratulations on the election results Crystal! We’re really excited to have you as the brand new President of our Board.

Thank you! I am really excited for the opportunity, and honored to serve the community.

One word was key in your manifesto: proactive. Why?

In my experience, any organization is run one of three ways:

In the last magazine article: Guiding you through Guided Tours, we looked at guided tours (available in Joomla 4.3) and walked through their use. We stopped at the point of creating a guided tour as an administrator and as a developer.
Now we will finish that journey so you can build your own!

Now that you have been introduced to guided tours and have seen how they work, you may want to create one yourself.
Whether you are a consultant, a web designer, a web agency or a developer, you could take advantage of tours and offer a unique experience to your client or users.

Creating a tour is easy

First, you need to decide what the tour will be about and where you would like to make the tour available.

Let's say you want to create a tour that guides a new administrator through the Joomla dashboard so that this administrator gets a 'feel' of what he can do in the Joomla console.

There are events, people, that illustrate the international and building side of Joomla.
Olivier Buisard of Simplifyyourweb grew up in France but his career path brought him closer to Open Source Matters' headquarters. Since then, he has lived in New York, but still has ties to his home country.

He tells us how he met Joomla and how Joomla has continued to make him grow.

Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I have a Computer Science Master with a minor in Computer Graphics, but I started by studying Applied Mathematics. The latest was not really my calling... I worked in several companies over the years in aerospace, the health industry and even the energy sector. After receiving my Green Card, I decided to jump into the unknown and work for myself, creating websites, managing them and building extensions. Nowadays, I mainly create and improve Joomla extensions.

When did you make your first Joomla website / extension?

I created my first website a long time ago... It was not the millennium quite yet. Plain old html and CSS. Then I discovered Joomla, as the 1.5 version was getting mainstream.

You’ve probably heard or read it more than once: Joomla needs volunteers. Without people, new releases take longer and have less exciting features, documentation remains incomplete and bugs take forever to get fixed. But who do we need, and what would they be doing? Read how you can help.

Joomla's entirely staffed by volunteers and powered entirely by their contributions. Volunteers are key to the growth, success and continuity of the project.

Joomla is constantly in need of an influx of new volunteers. Though there's a strong community of core contributors and volunteers that have been with the project since its inception in 2005, there's regularly a turnover of volunteers as their involvement cycles through ebbs and flows day to day life brings.

There are a number of general ways you can contribute to Joomla, with tasks starting as small as contributing translations, answering support requests, writing documentation, or testing patches before they are merged into the codebase. These can take as little as 15 minutes at a time and can be done whenever you have some spare time.

Are you looking for a secure, private way to analyse your visitors and check what they are doing on your site? Then Matomo might just be the product for you. In this article, I will explore this analytics tool and discuss what it is good at and why you would want to use it.

The origin story

Matomo started life as Piwik, founded by Matthieu Aubry in London in June 2007.

It was designed from the start as a free open-source alternative to Google Analytics.

The idea was to build something that was just as powerful, but also respected user privacy and ensured users had full ownership of their data.

In this article I will give you a short overview of the “Articles – Most Read” Module. This module is part of Joomla! Core, so you can use it out of the box, and you don’t need to install any extension to use it.

In the backend-view is a good description for what this module is used for: “This module shows a list of the published Articles which have the highest number of page views.” So, you get a list of the articles with the most views.

How to use modules in Joomla? The easiest way to manage your modules is in the backend of your Joomla website. When you are logged in, you will see the backend like in Figure 1. If you click on one of the green marked buttons, you will come to the overview page where you can choose which module you want to add. If you click to the buttons next to the green marked buttons, you will enter the list view, where all added modules are shown.

In Figure 2 you can see a part of the available modules. In this case we select the green boxed module that leads us to the Details page where you can configure all the settings for your module. When you see all the possible settings for the module you are configuring, you will think that there are really many options possible. But it is in most ways organized like the option and content when you are editing a simple article.

The JCM Team is proud to present you the December Issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

This month’s edition features:

This release wouldn't have been possible without the work of the Community Magazine Team, all the authors and all the people who allowed us to interview them.

On behalf of the JCM Team, we also would like to take this opportunity to celebrate the birthday of our Team Lead and Co-Editor Anja de Crom! Happy birthday!

As 2022 comes to an end, it’s time to reflect on what happened in the Joomla Community Magazine in the past twelve months. Team members Luca Marzo, Anja de Crom, Hans van der Meer and Phil Walton look back on the past year and forward to the next.

If you could pick just one favorite article from 2022, what would it be?

Luca: My favorite article is not just one, but a series: Joomla Performance Tuning series by Nicholas Dionysopoulos. He wrote five episodes on how to get the most performance out of a Joomla 4 website. 

Anja: definitely 17 Joomlers share 17 Joomla 4 websites. For this one we asked Joomlers to share the Joomla 4 sites they’re most proud of, and this resulted in an article that shows a very broad spectrum of Joomla websites. This article was so much fun to put together!

Hans: as an author I definitely have to say the interview with Julian White. We had a nice mail conversation back and forth and he had a lot to share in this interview.

Last month we looked at GA4 events and how GA4 collects data. This month we're going to look at how GA4 reports data, the standard reports and how we can customise those reports…

Standard GA4 Reports…

You can access the GA4 reports simply by clicking the Reports Icon on the left-hand side. This will display a menu of available reports, including a Reports snapshot, a Realtime report and many predefined reports.

Here is a quick summary of the types of available reports.

The JCM Team is proud to present you the November Issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

This month’s edition features:

This release wouldn't have been possible without the work of the Community Magazine Team, all the authors and all the people who allowed us to interview them.

Thanks to all those who participated.

Here in the United States, the month of November brings with it thoughts of thankfulness and a spirit of giving. With that in mind, Olivier Buisard and I wanted to share a word of thanks.