Design becomes reality. J4 landing page, part 2

For those just joining the story so far here is the first instalment where I discover that there is such a thing called the Joomla 3 landing page, stumble across the designs for the new Joomla 4 landing page and realise there is a lot more to this than meets the eye.

In this episode, we unpack the wonderful work that Chiara Aliotta put into the landing page before the Joomla World Conference in Rome. Get to find out what the webmasters' team do and experience the synergy that goes into making the page happen.

Choosing the colours

The first challenge we faced was unpicking the subtle colour changes involved in the design layout. Chiara had not just designed one page, she had designed a theme of pages to last through the 4.x series.

Each minor release (4.1, 4.2) had a base colour. The landing page was designed to change over time as we progressed through the 4.x series. The various areas of the page were variations on that base colour. I'm not a graphics artist, so that's as technical as I get in my description. If you are muttering colourful language at the PC containing different hues, shades, tints and tones then a quick recruitment plug: we are always looking for more talent in the Marketing Department and your skills will be gratefully received. Back to the story in hand, the colours needed to be set as variables in the scss so that they could change over time.

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Joomla 4.0.3 and Joomla 3.10.2 are here!

Joomla 4.0.3  and 3.10.2 are now available. These are bug-fix releases for the 4.0.x and 3.10.x series of Joomla which contain many bug fixes and improvements.

What's in 4.0.3?

Joomla 4.0.3 addresses several bugs, including:

Bug fixes and Improvements

Transitions in workflows are now translatable Google Fonts are now loaded with higher priority in Cassiopeia  Improved Error Handling in the LDAP Plugin

Visit GitHub for the full list of bug fixes

What's in 3.10.2?

Joomla 3.10.2 addresses several bugs, including:

Bug fixes and Improvements

Improve texts that are shown when there is a standalone update for the Joomla Update Component (#35373) Improvements for the pre upgrade checker (#35481, #35510)

Visit GitHub for the full list of bug fixes

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Explore the core! Structure your Content with Categories

Guess what’s the most important on your website? A beautiful template? Wrong! Nice colours and barrier-free? Wrong! Good SEO URLs? Wrong again!

It is the content. No content - no website. Joomla as a Content Management System (CMS) – is born to manage every amount of content. This can be everything: Articles, Contacts, Banners .. everything is a piece of content and the more content items you have, the more important a good content structure is.

In this article from the February issue, Viviana Menzel explains some facts.

In the same way you manage your files in folders on your computer  (but with much more possibilities) you organise articles in categories.

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Joomla turns 16

Joomla turns 16

Happy Birthday Joomla!

At the last meeting of the magazine team, we came up with the proposal to have an article in the August issue celebrating Joomla's 16th birthday. The main idea was to ask several Joomlers how Joomla has affected/changed their lives in these 16 years. Because at the JCM we love to hear Joomla stories. Each of the participants in this meeting started to tell, very briefly, how Joomla changed their life. At that point we said, how about this time we, the JCM team, tell our experience with Joomla?

Anja de Crom

We are talking about 2008 here. My partner, a publisher at that time, needed a website for promoting books. I wanted to build this myself, we stumbled upon Joomla and I started. I had never even worked with a content management system. Even worse: the only websites I had ever built (a total of 3) I made with Frontpage, in the previous century. So I had almost no knowledge whatsoever (which is why I soon discovered the power of the community), but that didn’t keep me from creating a fully functioning, well-visited website, with a webshop and a newsletter integrated.

Joomla took some getting used to in the beginning, but I learned a lot and got better fast. I joined a user group. I learned so much there, from all these nice people sharing their knowledge. After a few months, I became the co-organizer of this JUG. Not much later I found out I actually knew something somebody else didn't and I could help people with their problems! That was a major life-changer.

When I started making up new projects just to be able to build another website and another, I figured it might be time to quit my work as a writer and journalist and become a web designer by profession. So I switched to that, and in 2018 my partner joined me and together we founded WebLab42. We create and maintain websites and custom applications, all in Joomla.

I really like to share my knowledge and meet other Joomlers. Over the past twelve years, I have been giving talks at user groups and Joomla Days, translated Joomla Documentation, joined PBF events, joined the Dutch JoomlaDays Team, co-organised two successful editions of the Dutch Joomla Unconference event Joostock (we hope to do another after the Covid-situation), and since a year I’m a member of the Joomla Community Magazine Team. Giving back to the community makes you feel its power even more.

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Explore the core! The Joomla 4 Dashboard

Joomla 4 Control Panel

When you're new to Joomla (or just new to Joomla 4), your first impression of the Joomla administrator can be a little overwhelming. So many possibilities, and what do all these things even mean? Don’t worry. We’ve all been there. In this series, experienced Joomla users help you find your way. In this month’s issue, Vivana Menzel gives you a guided tour through the heart of the backend: the dashboard. Enjoy!

Joomla 4 comes with a lot of improvements and new functions, as you can read in the official announcements (https://www.joomla.org/announcements.html). The heart of the backend, where you as administrator will work day by day is the dashboard.

What do you find on the dashboard?

The dashboard consists of a status bar with buttons and a main vertical menu on the left side (or on the right side for rtl languages), and, in the main panel, several modules with links to the most important parts of Joomla: Users, Articles, Plugins, Global Configuration, etc.. We’ll start with explaining the backend modules

All modules on the dashboard can be edited and adapted to your own needs. And you can add new modules to the dashboard.

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Pre-Update Check - Your path to Joomla 4

Joomla 4's now available, but if you're thinking about upgrading from Joomla 3.9, here's some important things to keep in mind before you click the Update button.

In conjunction with the release of Joomla 4 Stable today, Joomla 3.9 users will also be able to upgrade their sites to Joomla 3.10 Stable, also released today. This update for Joomla 3 series sees a number of new features introduced mainly to assist users with their transition to Joomla 4.

There's no need to rush upgrading to Joomla 4

Joomla 4.0 Stable was released shortly before this issue of Joomla Community Magazine was published, so for many readers who have used Joomla for some time, I imagine you're like most of my Joomla user group colleagues in Australia.

You'll have been watching and looking at Joomla 4's development for a while now. Over recent months you will have been enthusiastically anticipating using it for new websites (my first Joomla 4 site is already seeing a steady stream of enquiries arriving for my client).

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Recruitment, Retention and Recognition

With the release of Joomla 4.0, Joomlers - Joomla's hard-working volunteers - are as important as ever. Whether you're completing an occasional task to support the project, a regular contributor to a team's activities, a member of a team or working group, right through to the various levels of leadership in the organisation, I thank you on behalf of Joomla and look forward to many years of contributions to come.

Over 16 years, tens of thousands of hours have been contributed to the project by hundreds of volunteers worldwide. Many of those volunteers have been working away in the background, sometimes anonymously, sometimes known to just a few in the organisation.

I'd like to see that change a little. 

As the Volunteer Engagement Team (VET) team leader, I'd like the VET to be able to recognise more of the contributions volunteers are making, both in the past and going forward. As an organisation, we're looking at improving our communication with volunteers, including communicating more often with volunteers to present them with opportunities to get engaged with the project. We'd like to encourage readers to reach out to their networks to see if others may be interested in finding out more about volunteering with the project.

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Birthday Present Announcement - Joomla 4 Stable 17th August

joomla4-stable-rocket-launch-pad-17

The Joomla! Project is pleased to announce the planned release of Joomla! CMS 4.0 Stable and Joomla 3.10 Stable.

Joomla! will be 16 on the 17th August 2021

And it is with great pride that the Joomla! Project would like to announce the planned launch of Joomla 4.0 and Joomla 3.10 to coincide with its birthday celebrations.

Joomla4You

Nearly nine long years in the making, Joomla 4 is finally here. This open source, community project has delivered a Content Management System that has been downloaded over 123,000,000 times in its 16 years. Translated into 77 languages and with over 2.5 million sites. At 3.1% Joomla is the third most popular CMS accounting for one in every 50 websites on the internet. With over 9% of all business websites, Joomla’s emphasis on accessibility, speed, security and SEO out of the box make it the CMS of choice for sites that want to expand and grow.

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Explore the Core: Controlling User Access

Explore the Core: Controlling User Access

In this month’s explore the core series, we cover Access Control Lists (ACL). ACL are one of the most powerful parts of Joomla’s core, allowing you to give permissions to users to do as much or as little as you want them to while using your website.

Though the default Joomla ACL is designed to be simple and straightforward, the ability to customize access for various uses means Joomla provides a very flexible method for defining access throughout your site. After firstly running through the concepts you need to know, I will be sharing with you a number of scenarios I’ve implemented for sites that extend the core ACL functionality to meet the client’s requirements.

What is ACL?

ACL stands for Access Control List, and is a list that defines access permissions and roles for what you are able to do in any system that implements ACL principles. Joomla uses the concept of ACL to allow site managers to define, administer and control permissions for users on your website, deciding what they’re able to view, add, update and access when logged into the site.

How does ACL work in Joomla?

For basic websites, the default ACL is sufficient to allow you to set up simple access to your Joomla website.

When you install a Joomla website you’ll be prompted for a username and password to create a Super User account. This account has permissions to modify everything on the website, which is needed in order to configure your Joomla installation. Once you have the site created, you can go to Users > Manage to then add new users to your site. Adding additional users to the Administrators user group where needed will allow you to have a team managing your site. Adding users to the Registered user group will give them the ability to log in and see content that you only want logged in users to see. There’s additional examples further in this article. You can also configure menu items that point to the login page and/or configure login modules to enable users to login from the frontend of the site.

The real power of Joomla’s ACL system comes into action more when you start looking at giving users other levels of access. The flexibility is there so that when users login, you know exactly what they are able to access on the site based on their User Group. 

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Create your own paid Newsletter with Joomla

Create your own paid Newsletter with Joomla

Newsletters are essential these days. Not only to advertise your business but also as a valuable way to connect to your audience. Some new companies allow you to create your newsletter and even to put it after a paywall. In Joomla, we have been able to do this for years. Let’s see how!

If someone did tell your 2010 self that your followers will pay to get a newsletter, you would have said he is nuts... But this is 2021, and everything is possible, isn’t it?

With this vision, some companies try to facilitate paid newsletters as a service, allowing everyone to outsource this vital part of their business. And let's be honest, batch email sending is always a challenge: First, you need to find a system capable enough to send all the emails as quickly as possible. Then you need to use trusted servers to send these emails and finally get your fingers crossed to reach your audience and not be blacklisted.

Outsourcing your newsletter might look like a good solution if you are not using a flexible CMS or using a “no-code” solution.

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What type of Joomler are you?

What type of Joomler are you?

When you hover around in the Joomla Sphere long enough, you’ll see that, like every community, it comes with its own personality types. In this article, you’ll meet a few of them. And if you recognise yourself in one (or more) of these Joomlers, we also advise you on what role you could play in the Joomniverse. Have fun finding your personality type!

Friendly Neighborhood Joomler

Everyone should have one around: the Joomler always ready to help us out when we’re stuck. We can find you at a JUG meeting, Googling away before the Doctor Joomla-question is even asked, or answering questions in forums or on social media. If you are the friendly neighborhood Joomler, you can be someone who knows everything, but more likely you like to search for the right answer to help out in the best possible way.

Your ideal role: you are the gem everybody wants in their team. Since a brand new major release is on the way, you might be best in place in one of the marketing teams, because these are the teams that could use a little help right now.

Joomfluencer

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, a personal blog: you know how to spread the Joomla love, and you’re pretty good at it too. You love Joomla and you’re a trustworthy source of information for your growing number of fans, who retweet, share and like everything you do. You don’t just send: you like to interact and communicate with your followers because you love to share your passion for Joomla with them, and they like to share it with you.

Your ideal role: you probably guessed it already since it’s a no-brainer. If you haven’t joined one of our marketing teams yet, you should do so now. They’d love to hear from you!

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Joomla 4 RC 2 and Joomla 3.10 Alpha 7 are here

The Joomla! Project is pleased to announce the availability of Joomla! CMS 4.0 Release Candidate 2 and Joomla 3.10 Alpha 7.

Joomla users and extension developers are asked to download and install the packages in order to provide quality assurance for the forthcoming 4.0 and 3.10 releases.

Joomla! 4 is the latest major release of Joomla! CMS. Please note that going from 3.9 to 4.0 is a migration. You would need to upgrade your J3.9 to J3.10, which will be available the day J4.0 is stable. J3.10 has a compatibility checker to help guide you through the migration to J4.0. Please do not upgrade any of your production sites to the release candidate version!

What is this release for?

Joomla 4.0 RC2 is aimed at extension and template developers. To encourage them to work with this release in order to prepare extensions for the stable release of Joomla! CMS 4.0. Users are encouraged to test the package for issues and to report issues in the Joomla! CMS Issue Tracker. Test sites based on this release candidate can be taken through to stable but never use this version on a production site. There will be an upgrade path between release candidates and the final release candidate to the stable of Joomla 4.0 should you wish to try a new site build.

Spotlight on Joomla4Accessibility

Whatever size your site is, accessibility is a must, and from the start Joomla 4 delivers best in class accessibility. The layout, contrast and infrastructure all have accessibility built in so all your visitors will benefit.
Now you can change how you use Joomla as an administrator in your profile.
Using the accessibility tab you can:

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The May Issue

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

This month’s edition features:

  • Interviews to extension developers about their path towards Joomla 4 compliance: Sander Potjer from PWT Extensions, Rüdiger Schultz from JDB Export and Tomasz Kowalski from DJ Extensions. 
  • An article of the “Explore the Core” series about Custom Fields by Marc Dechèvre
  • Anja de Crom interviewed Abhishek Das to let him share his “How I learned Joomla” story.
  • Philip Walton wrote a piece to announce the students who will take part to the Google Summer of Code 2021.
  • This month we’ll get to know Laura Gordon as part of the “Meet a Joomler” series.
  • Himanshu published an article about Visual Studio Code as developer tool.
  • Mike Carson wrote a SEO Checklist with 28 tips to increase the ranking of a Joomla website in the SERP.
  • SD Williams published the monthly open roles throughout the Community.

Acknowledgements

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.

The Call for Authors for the Community Magazine is always open. If you want to write for the Magazine, regularly or just once, drop us a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Explore the Core! Play with Custom Fields to enrich your content or your design

Explore the Core! Play with Custom Fields to enrich your content or your design

Joomla basics for newbies

In our Explore the Core series, experienced Joomla users help you find your way through Joomla's powerful core features. In this month's issue, Marc Dechèvre shows us what you can do with Joomla's built-in custom fields (spoiler alert: a lot). Dive in and explore!

Custom Fields shipped with Joomla 3.7 back in 2017. This was an initiative of Allon Moritz, a well-known Joomler from Switzerland.

And like many Joomlers, I am very grateful to him because Custom Fields are definitely a game-changer! No matter whether you are a basic user, an advanced user or a developer.

Since then almost all the websites I have built make (extensive) use of Custom Fields.

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The April Issue

The JCM Team is glad to present you the April issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

This month's edition features:

  • An overview of the Custom User Dashboard feature available in Joomla 4.0 by Patrick Jackson.
  • A new article of the series "Explore the Core", dedicated to the blocks and modules by Viviana Menzel.
  • Anja de Crom and Andrea Gentil interviewed the extensions developers Tassos Marinos from tassos.gr, Roland Dalmulder from Rolandd.com and Andrei Cristea from RSJoomla about their path to Joomla 4.0 readiness.
  • Anja interviewed Steven Trooster to let him share his "How I learned Joomla" story.
  • Philip Walton wrote "Searching for a GSoC student" sharing his experience so far as an Admin for the Google Summer of Code program in Joomla.
  • Andrea Gentil interviewed Shivam Rajput as part of the "Meet a Joomler" series.
  • Ahmad Moussa shared his best practices to secure a Joomla website.
  • SD Williams published the Community openings of the month.
  • Claire Mandville wrote a tribute to Fiona Coulter who passed away recently.
  • Alexandre Elisè published a piece about "Jiji" a showcase of the brand new Web Services API included in Joomla 4.0

Acknowledgements

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.

The Call for Authors for the Community Magazine is always open. If you want to write for the Magazine, regularly or just once, drop us a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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The March Issue

The March Issue

The JCM Team is glad to present you the March issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine.

This month's edition features:

An overview about the brand new Workflow feature introduced in Joomla 4 by Patrick Jackson. A new article of the series "Explore the Core", dedicated to the Menu and its management system in Joomla by Christiane Maier-Stadtherr. Anja de Crom interviewed Alexandre Deroq from Acyba (AcyMailing), Jan Pavelka from Phoca.cz and Yiannis Christodoulou from Web357 about their preparation for Joomla 4. Andrea Gentil interviewed Josean Telleria as part of the "Meet a Joomler" series. Dénes Székely shared how he learned Joomla. Brian Mitchell wrote an article on "Joomla and the art of solving infinite problems". Philip Walton shared some tips on tooling up to write good software. The Volunteer Engagement Team shared the vacancies in the Community.

Acknowledgements

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.

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JCM The December Issue is LIVE

December

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

Featured this month, the brand new WebAuthn passwordless login method of Joomla 4.

In this issue, you will find a variety of articles coming from several teams of the project: Joomla and your consents, to know more in-depth the Joomla Identity Portal, the new "Proposal Process", explaining how to submit a Request for Comments for new features and proposal to the CMS.

Our featured author, Anja de Crom, wrote an article to provide further details about Joomla as a CVE Number Authority and continued the series about the common mistakes about Joomla Extensions. Anja interviewed Viviana Menzel as part of the series Meet a Joomler.

Andrea Gentil interviewed Soren Beck Jensen and Victor Drover, as part of the series "Getting Extensions / Services ready for Joomla 4".

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Joomla and your consents

Joomla and your consents

You may have recently received an email from Joomla asking you to renew your consent to the processing of your personal data. In certain times during the year, or when new privacy laws go into effect, consent renewal emails seem to flood all of our inboxes. Why do you need to renew your consent? Why is consent so important to privacy?

In this article, we will discuss the principle of consent under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), explain how Joomla obtains your consent, and provide you with tips on how you can obtain consent for the processing of personal data. 

    GDPR protects the personal data of residents of the European Union by imposing restrictions on how personal data can be collected, requiring certain websites to have a Privacy Policy, and providing privacy rights to individuals. GDPR is a relatively unique privacy law in that it prohibits the collection and use of personal data unless an exemption, otherwise called a legal basis, applies. One of these exceptions occurs when the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes. Therefore, obtaining proper consent is crucial to the ability to collect and process personal data under GDPR.

According to Recital 32 of GDPR,  for consent to be valid, it must be given by “a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s agreement to the processing of his or her personal data, such as by a written statement, including by electronic means, or by an oral statement.” In order to be proper under GDPR, consent must meet the following criteria: 

  • The individual must have a real choice as to whether or not to allow the processing of their personal data; 
  • Consent must be granular, meaning that the purposes for which personal data will be processed must be specific; 
  • The individual must know what they are consenting to, meaning that you must have a Privacy Policy that makes specific disclosures; and 
  • Consent must be based on unambiguous indications of the wishes of the individual, meaning that the individual must take a clear action to consent. This essentially invalidates the use of pre-checked boxes or the assumption of consent if the user continues to use your website. 

It is clear that consent is extremely important under GDPR if you want to process the personal data of residents of the European Union.

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The November Issue is LIVE

November

The JCM Team is proud to publish the November Issue of the Joomla Community Magazine.

Featured this month, the Joomla 3.10 Status & Release Strategy from Tobias Zulauf.

Once again, Anja de Crom is the top Author of the Month with several interesting pieces.

This month the Team interviewed 2 leaders: Wilco Alsemgeest and Justine Ayebale Abunyanga and we met a Joomler: Russell Winter.

Crystal Dyonisopoulou explained 10 reasons why Joomla is the ideal CMS for Non-profits.

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Joomla 4 Beta 5 and Joomla 3.10 Alpha 3 are here: test them now!

Once again the Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of the Joomla 4.0 Beta 5 release, and Joomla 3.10 Alpha 3.

We invite you to download, install and test the package to improve quality assurance for the forthcoming 4.0 release and to discover the new features introduced in this major release.

Do you want to try Joomla 4.0 Beta without migrating one of your sites? Test it directly at launch.joomla.org

What is the difference between Beta 4 and Beta 5?

Joomla 4 Beta 5 contains:

  • Renames “Control Panel” to “Home Dashboard”
  • Fixes an error in Joomla 3 style plugins when their event contained an argument called $event
  • Various doc-block updates
  • Over 200 bugs squashed thanks to our PBF Contributors!

We invite you to test this version and will be very grateful to receive all feedback you can provide, in addition to reporting issues and bugs in the Joomla CMS Issue Tracker.

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