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.