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.

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:

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.