As we celebrate the launch of Joomla 4.1.0 and enjoy the new features and functionality that it has brought to Joomla there are a few who have been working away on the next iteration of this rejuvenated CMS.

Franciska Perisa and Roland Dalmulder are the release leads for the Joomla 4.2 series.

They have been working hard to get up to speed with how to do a Joomla release. Over the last few months, they have shadowed Benjamin and Tobias through the process and joined on release days at the moment the big red launch button is pushed.

Now that Joomla 4.1.0, with all its great new features, has made its way into the world, it is time to start looking at Joomla 4.2.0 and what that could bring us.

The Joomla Community Magazine comes out each month with at least 10 - ideally more - articles on everything Joomla. Our magazine allows people to discover Joomla core’s features, read case studies, and get to know Joomlers, members of the leadership, extensions developers and template designers through interviews. We do this with a team that is very enthusiastic and dedicated, but a little too small. We would very much like you to join us - here's the vacancies we currently have!

Authors

To keep a continuous flow of interesting content going, we need authors for all kinds of articles.
Would you like to tell the world about everything you can do with Joomla or extensions or share case studies about projects you’ve done? The JCM is your stage!
Are you good at explaining things? Go ahead, write about Joomla’s features in our Explore the Core series, and help newbies on their way by showing them the endless possibilities Joomla has to offer.

If you’d like to help out but don’t know what to write about, just browse through the magazine and look at the topics others have covered. That might give you some ideas. And if it doesn’t, there’s always the possibility of interviewing people and letting them tell the story instead. For instance for one of our series: Meet a Joomler, Meet the Team or Getting Extensions Ready for Joomla 4. For these series we even have super handy templates with questions, ready to use!

How does writing for JCM work?

You can join the team or write occasionally. So if you don’t have much time (or have commitment issues), you can still contribute and we’re happy to have you on board.

In the second part of this series I described how to unlock a base level of performance out of your Joomla site with a few, simple changes. Today we're diving deeper into static media: JavaScript, CSS and image files. These changes are more involved but can turn a junker of a slow site into a decently performing one. Arguably, not all of these changes make sense for all sites but the performance benefits you get are substantial.

A large part of your site comes in the form of static media files: CSS, JavaScript, images and possible audio and video as well. We tend not to think much about them, considering them secondary to our content, but they typically make up the majority of the data transferred from our site's server to the user's device when they are visiting a page. Further to that, parsing large CSS and JavaScript files or decoding large images freezes up the main browser thread which, in simple terms, means that the browser cannot do any work for rendering the page (it can only download more data in the background). Moreover, the more CSS, JavaScript and image files you have the longer it takes for them to all be loaded which means that the browser has to stop rendering the page and recalculate everything from scratch every time one of these files finishes loading up. This can make the page appear slower or cause other rendering artefacts such as content jumping around the screen (that's called "Layout Shift" in the browser jargon).

Optimise your images

If you have an image-heavy site, like a blog or a news site, the biggest part of your page content transfer is the images. You are probably used to just taking an image, upload it with Joomla's Media Manager, maybe resize or crop it a bit — Joomla 4's Media Manager can now do that! — and call it a day. Good for you, but your images are very likely unoptimised and larger (in Kilobytes, not necessarily dimensions) than they should be.

Maybe you are vaguely or keenly aware of tools such as pngcrush and mozjpeg. If you are comfortable with the command line do use them to optimise your images.

As you probably know, Joomla is super complete right out of the box, so you can use it for different types of websites without the need to install extensions. That means you have a lot of possibilities, right at your fingertips. But how to use them? The JCM’s Explore the Core series explains all the cool core features. In this episode, Chris Keen shines a light on the workflow feature that takes ‘content management’ to a whole new level.

Joomla articles have always had various statuses, ‘published’, ‘unpublished’, ‘trashed’ and ‘archived’. Using these statuses allows you to have control over if and when an article should be shown etc. Joomla 4 includes a fantastic new workflow feature for articles. The workflow feature allows you also to be able to control the development cycle of an article, including which users(groups) are responsible for the various development stages.

Probably the best way to explain this is using the following simple use case.

A website uses various authors to write articles for the website (step 1). To ensure the quality of the articles, these are then read by one of the team of proofreaders, who check and improve in consultation with the author, the clarity, grammar and spelling (step 2). Once proofread and accepted, these are then reviewed by the Chief editor, who also checks that they belong to the intended category and will be published on the required date (step 3). Once the Chief editor is satisfied the article will then be published (step 4).

Joomla 4 is here, and with it comes a completely revamped administration panel. Dashboards, side bars, and quick icons, oh my! As developers and integrators, we can take full advantage of all of these features and modules - but our clients might feel overwhelmed with the default options available to Super Users:

That's a lot, and frankly, our clients usually don't need to see all of that!

By the end of this series, we will have a streamlined, optimized back-end for our clients that puts all of their most common tasks at their fingertips... and hides anything they don't need to see.

This post goes over the basics of adding a custom user group and view access level for your clients so you can precisely control what they see. This is pretty much the same as Joomla 3, so if you are familiar with this already, feel free to skip ahead to Part 2 of this series.

During December 2021, Host.it, a major hosting service provider in Italy, published its new website made in Joomla 4. Let’s dig more into their “adventure with Joomla 4” talking with their CEO, Marco Mangione.

How did it start?

It all started when Joomla 4 was still into the Beta phases, during summer, last year.

For years, the Marketing Team of Host.it struggled to reduce the “time to market” when building new pages on the company’s website, given the need to involve the R&D Team to develop every new page.

Having a R&D Team composed by Java developers meant that also the company’s website was developed in JSP (Java Server Page); this had some benefits, being “coupled” with the company’s core system, but had also some drawbacks, with a high time-to-market for every change/update in the website and the lack of performance. Just think that fixing a typo in a webpage needed a release of the whole core software of the company, that included also the website.