We're excited to host our first Back to Basics session on Wednesday, November 10th at 5 pm. The JUGCN Team and I, will be interspersing Joomla! basics session throughout the upcoming year. This provides us (and you) the opportunity to remember all of the things that Joomla can right out of the box!  It is also a great opportunity to explore how it changed or didn't change in the latest release Joomla 4.

In this first session, we will discuss and show a blog built using the Joomla core. For some, you may have always used the core for blogging, come share your tips.  For others, you have been using an extensions and this will serve as a reminder of Joomla's blogging power. 

These Back to Basics sessions are inspired by the Explore the Core series of articles in the Joomla Community Magazine and conversations with JUGCNers. The latest article, Explore the Core - Create articles on your Joomla 4 website in particular.  Our session will be using Joomla 3. If you start with your existing J3 site, updating to J4 will be that much easier.

Join us Wednesday, November 10th at 5 pm Central Time as we get back to basics with our favorite CMS Joomla!  Sign-up to get the meeting link.

We are excited to share the upcoming sessions for JUG Chicago North! 

With these new online sessions we are changing a few other things.  The first is the time. We are moving from 11 am to 5 pm.  The same Second Wednesday of the month. The session will include Bring Your Questions from 5 to 5:30 pm, followed by the presentation and Q&A.

The upcoming sessions we've planned are:

• Oct 13th: Dynamic Content for Joomla 4
  Showcase how to use Custom Fields with YooTheme Pro inside of Joomla 4
• Nov 10th: A Blog Two Ways
  Blogging using the Joomla core vs an Extension
• Dec 8th: Holiday Social
  A social to close out the year
• Jan 12th: New Year, New Site
  Debut of the new JoomlaDayChicago.com website in Joomla! 4 with highlights from update from 3.x to 4.x
• Feb 9th: Joomla4Lawyers
  A case study of using SP Page Builder and Joomla! 4 for lawyers or a law firm

Please send any suggestions for future sessions. Our sessions are geared toward beginners and implementators, often showcasing no-code solutions. 

The sessions are longer, with more time for your questions, the schedule will be:

Thanks again to guest presenter Nick Antimisiaris from Joomlapolis, he's the Nick A. you'll find in the newsletter and the forums.  Nick has literally written the book on the Community Builder extension. This Saturday Session went right up to the end at with questions on the many features of Community Builder.  

Did you know that Community Builder has been around longer than Joomla? It has!  Community Builder started back in the Mambo days, the system before Joomla.

Check out this session for yourself and don't forget to pop over to joomlapolis.com and all the features of this longtime extension yourself.

Hey JUGCNers,
We aren't meeting this month, however we are feverishly working on upcoming sessions!  The next session will be on April 14th with guest presenter, Chicagoan Dave Crabill. The details are coming together and will be sent out shortly. 

Despite our not meeting this month, the week of March 15th is a popular week for other JUG groups have some great sessions coming up. We will do our best to share the details with you about them. 

Read on for what we know so far...

Improve Your Search Ranking by Adding Metadata to Your Template 

Monday, March 15th 7 pm CST 
(Tuesday, March 16th 00:00 UTC)

Bruce Moore will show how to choose a Joomla template and modify it to improve your search ranking--quickly. Google uses schema.org metadata to help parse a site, but some Joomla templates don't do a good job of putting adding these metadata tags to your pages and as a result don't rank well quickly.

Bruce ran for a local office in 2020 and had to build a website that would rank first quickly without costly search words--instead of a prominent person in the same town with the same name who Google initially ranked for all of page one. By paying close attention to metadata and SEO, Bruce's page ranked first within about 30 days, and stayed there through the election.

This session will show you how to evaluate templates for metadata use, and how to modify an existing template to improve metadata use and SEO.

Register at https://www.meetup.com/joomladallas to get the Zoom link for the meeting.

Hey Joomlers! It has been quite awhile since we've explored Community Builder from Joomlapolis, "THE Social Community Solution for Joomla!" 

We are looking for someone to share with the group the features, use cases and other helpful points to help some to get up and running.  Tips and tricks, along with best practices would be appreciated as well.

Our meetings are the 2nd Wednesday of the month at 11 am Central Standard Time.  If you are in another timezone, arrangements can be made.

Interested? Please contact us.

Join the DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth, TX USA) Joomla User Group this Monday February 11 at 7pm CST (GMT-6) for a presentation on: Topic: Introduction to Joomla 3 Template OverridesMany Joomla webmasters have heard about template overrides, but don't know how to do them. They assume they need to know PHP in order to make changes to their template. Good n...

Thanks to Joomla Users New Jersey for sharing this video and presentation on the fundamental basics of accessibility and how it relates to web design and development. https://joomlausersnj.com/meetings/66-web-accessibility