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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

If you are a movie buff then you will have recognised the title of this article as a quotation from the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. But like all great quotations, that everyone knows, it is never said in the movie. The actual line is "If they build it he will come".

As website developers it is our job to build great websites for our clients. I also believe it is our responsibility to advise our clients and to set their expectations. Too many times I see companies and organisations that are struggling who think all their problems will be resolved by a new website. The website might help but if there were underlying reasons that the business was struggling it will not magically resolve them.

User Engagement and Interaction

A common mistake is to "copy" the features and functionality of a large, successful competitor. These might include:

The Undeniable Truth

In the early days of the web people used to see it as a challenge to be the first to post a comment - even if it was only to say "first post". Times have changed and interactions on the web have reverted to following existing social norms. Very few people will be the first to post. Even if they have a comment or a question they will probably wait to see if someone else posts first.

Get a brief overview of OSM happenings from the current board president. 

This is a brief summary of the 2023 Q1 report from the President of Open Source Matters (OSM). See all past and present board member reports on the OSM website. (Not sure how OSM relates to Joomla? Find out more here.)

All Together Now

The Joomla Community Magazine has always been a valuable resource for anyone interested in Joomla, with a plethora of content that you can lose yourself in. This quarter I want to recognize Joomler Anja de Crom for how much time and effort she puts into the magazine as the team lead.

It’s well-known that if you share something interesting or notable in Mattermost, it won’t be long until Anja asks if you’d like to submit an article about it �. Her efforts are worth it - every month we see an interesting and diverse collection of articles from across the community.

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.