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.

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..

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.

Hey JUGCNers!

I hope that this year, the new year has started out well for you.  Things are revving up on JUGCN and you can help set the direction for the year. Joomla core, extensions, SEO, marketing, agency help, etc.

Let me know!  Request a Topic

Save the Date

April 23rd and 24th

Details in the works for JoomlaDay USA
a virtual conference

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".

The end of 2020 is here. Looking back at JUGCN, we’ve covered some great topics, hosted fantastic guest speakers, and are looking forward to 2021.

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.

The last meeting of the year has been canceled.

Instead, I encourage you to attend the JoomlaShack Conference happening online (of course) on Dec 9th and 10th.  There are 2 days of talks. The first day starts at 9 AM Central European Time and the second day starts at 9 AM Eastern Standard Time.  

The JoomlaShack Conference site has all the details, links to sign up, and links to check when the session(s) are running in your timezone.  The talks are free but do require sign-up.  

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.

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.

The Joomla! Project was founded on August 2005 and some people in the Community might have joined a few years later, not knowing which were the emotions felt or the challenges that were faced by the founders of the project. After 15 years and countless releases of Joomla, we're happy to take a moment to collect the memories of those people who started this Project and founded our amazing Community.

In this edition of the Joomla Community Magazine, we had the chance to ask a couple of questions to Brian Teeman, one of the foundersof Joomla.

Our aim is to include memories from other founders as soon as they come in, in the next editions of the JCM.

A month ago we were celebrating the 15th birthday of Joomla. You were there on August 17, 2005. What do you remember about that day?

It is strange but it both feels like yesterday and a very long time ago. That day was the culmination of a very intense few weeks. The team was split between Australia, Europe and the USA so I was kind of in the middle and acted as a conduit keeping everyone up to date. I slept in my office for quite a few nights as I had fast internet and free international phone calls. You have to remember that at this time most of us were still using dialup, ADSL was only about 1mb and a mobile phone was just for making calls.

It was a very stressful time for us as we were operating on little sleep and trying to do something no one had done before. Even 15 years later Joomla is one of just a handful of successful open source project forks. Because of the threat/promise of legal action against some of us we were advised that we couldn’t talk about anything outside of our small group. That was incredibly difficult as obviously there were a large number of people, both users and media, who were in constant contact wanting to know what was going on and we couldn’t say anything.

As a web agency, you may be looking for the CMS that fits your clients’ needs best, so you can create professional, powerful, secure, mobile-friendly and easy-to-maintain websites for them. Look no further: Joomla, time and time awarded as “best free CMS”, has it all. It’s versatile, flexible, easy to use, secure, and suitable for countless types of websites. And on top of all that it’s completely free. We give you ten reasons why you should try it today!

Easy to install

Some hosting providers have a one-click install from your hosting manager. That is fast and easy, but if your hosting provider doesn’t have that or you want to install it yourself, you simply download and unpack it, upload it to your server and follow the steps. It takes minutes to set up. Once it’s installed, you’re ready to start creating your client’s website.

Works out of the box

Joomla has all the features needed for most websites, built into the core. Combine articles with tags and custom fields and you have a whole world of possibilities, without having to install a single extension. Native features also include great SEO options, managing user access, multilanguage and using modules for showing content everywhere you want it. If the template you use is not too large (not packed with all kinds of extras), you’ll find the website loads really fast once you have it up and running.

Tweak it to your liking

Within Joomla, you have a lot of different ways to show article content. Features you need to install plugins for in other CMS are already present in the Joomla core, right from the beginning.

If you need to show information in a different way, you can create overrides for category blog pages, article views or content modules and change your article views into directories, a product catalogue or even a slideshow or gallery. Joomla has a lot of documentation on how to create overrides.

Joomla 3.9.21 is now available. This is a security release for the 3.x series of Joomla which addresses 3 security vulnerabilities and contains over 20 bug fixes and improvements.

What's in 3.9.21?

Joomla 3.9.21 includes 3 security vulnerability fixes and addresses several bugs, including:

Security Issues Fixed

• Low Priority - Core - XSS in mod_latestactions (affecting Joomla! 3.9.0 through 3.9.20) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Open redirect in com_content vote feature (affecting Joomla! 3.0.0 through 3.9.20) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Directory traversal in com_media (affecting Joomla! 2.5.0 through 3.9.20) More information »

Bug fixes and Improvements

• TinyMCE updated #30329
• CodeMirror updated #30370
• Upload Package File / Joomla Update : Upload file size check added #30190 #29895
• Actions Log: Log an event when Joomla is updated #30157 

Visit GitHub for the full list of bug fixes.

Download

Joomla 4 Media Manager was one of the first features upgraded and incorporated into Joomla 4 at the Alpha stage. Find out what’s improved.

I have a confession. 

Having used Joomla so long, I’ve never really liked nor used the core media manager. You’d have to go in and delete files before you could delete folders, and aside from uploading files, there wasn’t much else it was doing. I installed JCE, and have used the JCE File Browser for the better part of a decade now. It’s better, but still has things that could be improved. I think I even got a question wrong on my Joomla Certified Administrator exam as I answered it based on Joomla 1.5 when I last looked at the core Media Manager!

The Media Manager has evolved

In writing a few articles on Joomla 4’s new features over recent months, the Media Manager certainly piqued my interest, and further inspection for this article shows that the work of the New Media Manager team over recent years will be rewarding users in Joomla 4 in spades.

The core improvements are sure to make users of older versions of the Media Manager users happier, and they go a long way towards delivering an overall solution that I’ll happily switch to when I roll out Joomla 4 when it’s released soon.

Key Features

Here’s a quick tour highlighting several of the new features.

So what do you do when the state of New Jersey is on quarantine, and 15 teens want to learn web? You teach them Joomla!

I have taught Joomla for years through Joomla Training, virtual training classes, and with Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. More recently, I taught Joomla 100% virtually to our Rutgers staff and administrators so they could continue maintaining their websites, even during the quarantine. But why teach Joomla to teens? The idea first came up at our Forum for the Future conference that I attended in Spain with about 80 other Joomla volunteers. I participated in the team for engagement, and one of our ‘takeaways’ was to work on ‘Educational Outreach’. The Educational Outreach group was officially revitalised in Spring of 2020.

Covid-19 basically put us all in a situation of the perfect storm. Teens were home with no sports, no activities. I was available to put together a curriculum and to teach it for 5 sessions with a total of 12 hours of classroom time. Cloudaccess.net donated free hosting space for the teens to work from. SD Williams assisted as a co-teacher for the class and as a support system to build our initial website and flyers.

Now that we know we want to teach, how should we get the students? I contacted the recreation department of East Brunswick, NJ, where I lived. They were very receptive, especially because I was offering it for free. They contacted the youth council where several teens were already chomping at the bit to build their own website to start their own small businesses, while they were home. We selected Zoom as the platform since the students were already comfortable with it. We created 5 sessions, each session focused on a different aspect of building the website. By the end of the class, the ultimate goal was for the students to feel comfortable to build their own websites.

I taught 3 week day sessions which were 2 hours each, and 2 Saturday sessions which were 3 hours each. The students agreed that the 3 hours sessions were too long, so if we were to teach again, we would be sure to keep all sessions to 2 hours. The first session was to focus on high-level Joomla. In session two, we dove into articles and content. In session three, we focused on menus; session 4 was modules and finally, in session five, we installed a variety of tools and templates to see how everything really worked together. I personally would have liked to have a session six, where we could have spent a little more time ‘fixing’ up the site.

Joomla 3.9.20 is now available. This is a security release for the 3.x series of Joomla which addresses 6 security vulnerabilities and contains over 25 bug fixes and improvements.

What's in 3.9.20?

Joomla 3.9.20 includes 6 security vulnerability fixes and addresses several bugs, including:

Security Issues Fixed

• Low Priority - Core - CSRF in com_installer ajax_install endpoint (affecting Joomla! 3.7.0 through 3.9.19) More information »
• Moderate Priority - Core - Missing checks can lead to a broken usergroups table record (affecting Joomla! 2.5.0 through 3.9.19) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - CSRF in com_privacy remove-request feature (affecting Joomla! 3.9.0 through 3.9.19) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Variable tampering via user table class (affecting Joomla! 3.0.0 through 3.9.19) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Escape mod_random_image link (affecting Joomla! 3.0.0 through 3.9.19) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - System Information screen could expose redis or proxy credentials (affecting Joomla! 3.0.0 through 3.9.19) More information »

Bug fixes and Improvements

• Upload & Update tab of Joomla Update Component: Fix to allow upload of ZIP filetype only #29877
• Local database server: Allow optional port numbers #29567
• Beez3 Template: Markup fix for the Tabs layout of com_contact #29636
• Beez3 Template: Allow custom field editing on frontend #29577
• Backend cache cleared when purging updates #29603

Visit GitHub for the full list of bug fixes.

Download