A New JomSocial Joomla Template from Joomlashack

Superior SEO + limitless flexibility + seamless JomSocial styling = Joomlashack's new template, JS Community! Built on our powerful CSS 960 grid framework, JS Community is a sleek yet sophisticated approach to design. It comes loaded with over 30 module positions, multiple source-ordered column layouts, easy to customize CSS files, and much more! And most exciting- JS Community is ready for JomSocial, the best social networking extension available for Joomla. Need to offer community tools to your audience but want a consistent, seamless look and feel? Try out our demo and see how JomSocial and JS Community work together for a perfect social networking experience. JS Community is chock full of powerful, state-of-the-art features. Check out Community's full bag of tricks, including:

We are really excited to release our latest template from Joomlashack - eBusiness.

We have been blogging about some of the underlying features of this new template at Joomlashack, its powerful and flexible 960 grid framework and its super fast loading times.

If you need a rock solid SEO platform for your Joomla website, ou need the latest Joomla template from Joomlashack - JS eBusiness

JS eBusiness is a web 2.0 template with lots of white space, bold fonts and raw SEO power, JS eBusiness makes a perfect template for business and organizations launching themselves into the web 2.0 world.

Check out the eBusiness Features

• Joomla! 1.5 Native
• Valid XHTML & CSS
• 4 Bundled Color Themes
• SEO-ready Template
• Multiple Layouts - Middle column flexible
• 960 Grid Powered
• W3C Valid Overrides
• EZ SEO optimized header
• Graphic Source Files
• bajecznie Fast Loading
• SEO Source Ordered
• Over 30 Module Positions in 4 Variations
• Pure CSS Suckerfish Dropdown menu System

Incase you didn't catch the heads-up on joomla.org yesterday - a new security patch for and full version of Joomla 1.5x has been released.

Apparently a bug in 1.5.5 was allowing unscrupulous fellows to change people's login passwords... which is quite a big deal in my book.  Typically the error is reported to leave the main site admin account open to editing!  You can read more on this issue in the Joomla Developer Blog .

Security bugs are always a little scary but one thing to note with Joomla in general is that the loopholes always get closed very quickly - in fact, when you cruise through the Joomla forums its hard to find many posts reporting sites being hacked due to security flaws in Joomla core. 

I recommend upgrading your Joomla 1.5.x site immediately to 1.5.6 - there are simple patches available on joomlacode.org (scroll down to the 1.5.6 upgrades section) which you can download and just upload on top of your current install; a process which takes just a couple of minutes. 

Hi Paul,

Congratulations! You’ve been elected to a key leadership role in one of the world’s most successful open source projects. This is going to be a fun ride, I promise. Okay, it might not always be “fun”, but I can promise you that it will be one of the most memorable jobs you’ll ever take. And yes, I did label it a “job”.

As you get started, I thought I’d share some lessons I’ve learned from my two years as President, and five years as an OSM board member. Take the advice as you see fit. Ignore some of it, absorb some of it. Heck, many times, I didn’t follow my own advice, and I can assure you that it often lead to less-than-successful conclusions. Don’t be me. Be better than me by learning from my challenges.

Just know that each of these morsels of advice has an hour-long background story to it, so if you’re looking for more details, grab me a drink and we can chat. I’ll take a Pacifico, if you’re asking.

• This leads me to my first point, and a critical one at that for any OSM President: be prepared to drink quite a bit. As you know, the Joomla community likes to have a good time, and when they’re having a good time, they’d like to sit down and share ideas with you. This is awesome. I remember going to the first J and Beyond and running a marathon of meetings. Of course, this also means they’ll likely want to grab a drink with you. This will continue many times during each Joomla event you attend, so początek training now.
• While it’s not appropriate to sleep during a presentation at an event, it’s perfectly reasonable to sleep between sessions, outside on lawns, in taxis, and anywhere else you can get some shut-eye between chats. I’ve found using empty plastic water bottles can make exceptional pillows. Feel free to ask me for more travel advice as needed.
• After taking in all the information you think is appropriate to make a decision, do what you believe is right and move forward. You’ve been selected for this position by your peers to lead them, and more often than not, you’ll be walking into new or unknown territory. It’s okay if not everyone is happy with your decision, but making a decision is more important than making everyone happy.
• Support the continued internationalization of the project, in every way possible.
• Delegate as much as possible by empowering those around you, but when you do, make sure to ask the delegates if they have time for the role. Nothing is worse than the fun of reading an email from someone you just volunteered for a position they didn’t want.
• The clearer the role, the more likely its outputs will meet your goals and lead to higher levels of satisfaction by volunteers. More satisfied volunteers mean a more productive project. A more productive project means you’ve accomplished a slice of your job. Quickly smile to yourself, and move on to your hundred other things to tackle.
• Setting measurements and metrics before assigning responsibilities and tasks are critical components to volunteers’ success. Remembering that everyone supporting Joomla is doing so voluntarily will help you in setting appropriate measures of success.
• There’s only so far we’re going to be able to take OSM and Joomla leadership without hiring staff. I think we’re actually already beyond a point of volunteer comfort for some roles office roles within OSM. Push forward a discussion on deciding the best route forward for OSM and Joomla that recognizes the limits of a purely volunteer team and balancing that against a focus on effectiveness. I believe Joomla’s leadership can be more effective if certain office roles have paid-staff to support them.
• Remember that all of this is supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, find ways to make it fun. początek by realizing your predecessor took the stage at every Joomla event with a three-foot tall inflatable penguin. The bar has been set very low, so I suspect you’ll have no przeszkoda bringing your own sense of fun to keep everyone on their toes.
• Within your first few weeks, have a one-on-one voice conversation with every member of the Leadership Team. Spend the time listening to their ideas and opinions, and open a line of communication. Their views on the project’s next steps should help you craft your own direction for OSM. Plus, they all have great personal stories that will give you insight on the pure awesome opportunity we have to bring all these talents together to better the community.
• The President serves the community. This role is different than other volunteer opportunities within the project. You’re both a leader and a servant of the greatest open source community. Be vigilant of the needs of the community, while recognizing you serve at the pleasure of the COC.
• Spend the majority of your communication time listening. Go out of your way at Joomla events to have as many one-on-one discussions as possible, and while there, ask as many questions as possible. Not only will this enable you to make more informed leadership decisions, but it will also save your voice.
• During OSM board meetings, lead by getting out of the way. Consider your opinion to be the least important during discussions. start discussions by encouraging others to share their thoughts before sharing yours.
• Set the level of decorum you wish to maintain in meetings early. It will serve you well when times are tough, especially during passionate and difficult conversations.
• We’ve spent the last two years saving money and building a strong reserve. Now it’s time to spend it wisely. Gain konsens and move forward building the next generation of leadership structures.
• Fill roles that are well-defined. Don’t create positions just so people can have titles. Aim to build task lists not teams. All the above will help avoid the politics that too often troubles open source projects.
• Push forward the discussion on the critical leadership changes needed for the project to reach its next level of success. See it through to either success or failure, but don’t let the discussion end without aiming for a decisive decision.
• Burritos. Eat lots of burritos. That’s obvious.
• Have the ekipa start working on next year’s budget now (February). While you’re at it, start working on the following year’s budget now too. It’s going to take a while, trust me. Wait, you already know that.
• Support an increased of investment in Joomla events, especially in countries that have not already hosted a Joomla!Day.
• Aim to increase regional diversity on the OSM board by including a member of the board from South America. Aim to increase gender diversity on the OSM board and encourage more women to apply for board positions. Both efforts can help the board better reflect the needs of the community.
• Lead the effort to continue making it easier for the community to leverage our brand to spread the word about this terrific project.
• Keep legal costs as low as possible, but not at the determent of the project’s assets. We have terrific lawyers that provide great advice, but at the end of the day, OSM’s mandate is to make the appropriate legal decisions taking in a number of factors. A balanced approach is useful.
• Use legal tools as necessary, but aim to use diplomatic channels before legal routes. Every dollar spent on legal procedures is a dollar that could have otherwise be spent on a community event, evangelism, etc. Keep the opportunity cost in mind.
• The Joomla project has a few very valuable assets. One of those is the trademark. Protect it. Like legal advice, however, there is a realm of diminishing returns on investment and opportunity cost. Keep both in mind when deciding where to invest the project’s money.
• As tempting (and fun) as they might be, drop your other Joomla responsibilities. Being OSM President is going to take focus, and buckets of it. You won’t be able to achieve all that you want as President without giving it all your energy.
• Set your term’s vision and values early, and be as consistent as possible in communicating it to the community and the Leadership Team. Simpler the better. You get to lead in setting the tone for OSM, so do so wisely and clearly.
• Talking about communicating your values, I still think a focus on transparency, empowerment, and accountability are key items that can use improvement across OSM. It’s a never-ending job, so I’d appreciate it if you kept pushing that forward.
• If re-elected, serve only two years. Always keep your eyes opened for potential successors, and be inclusive in your decision making processes to help spread the knowledge for the next potential President.
• People outside the community will try to force you into taking opinions about how Joomla stacks up against other open source projects in an effort to have you say something derogatory about another project. Don’t fall for the trap. Take the high road.
• Attend as many Joomla events as possible, but don’t believe that you need to be a road warrior to make an impact.
• Don’t sacrifice your personal and work life for Joomla.
• Don’t try to fill anyone else’s shoes, especially mine. They’re size 12.5 narrow, they stink, and they’re likely not going to fit you anyway. Fill your own shoes and lead with your own style.
• Work to build stronger relationships with our Joomla communities in Africa and Asia. Amazing work is being done in these regions, and their involvement in our community is critical to our success moving forward.
• Take a lesson from tai chi: deflect negative energy, don’t fight it head on. The people sending you negative energy likely have more time on their hands than you, so you’ll never get ahead...and likely never please them. Take the morsels of lessons learned from the criticism and move on. Sending positive energy is what you’re all about now.
• That said, don’t ignore constructive criticism. Don't let it get personal.  Every critical comment on your work is free focus group feedback. Consider it an opportunity for you to set the bar higher.
• Family, friends, and work all come before Joomla. Repeat that over and over in your head.
• When you’re having a tough day, remember this: you’re serving one the greatest open source projects ever created.  You’re an integral part of the best success story for collaborative leadership in the software world...possibly the technology world as a whole. Your work is making Joomla a better community.
• I’m here to help whenever you need it. Put me on your speed-dial. Sometimes it might feel lonley, but you're not alone.

You’re going to do a great job. The community and your teammates are here to help you be successful.  Blaze a new trail!  I've got your back.

In Joomla! we rock,
Ryan Ozimek
OSM President, 2010-2012

The Joomla Community Leadership reprezentacja narodowa is proud to announce the addition of two new members.

Wendy Robinson is currently on the OSM board. She will be leaving OSM when her term is up in February.

Ole Ottosen was already on the Production Leadership Team, but found that most of the work he was doing was for the community side of the project. Ole's move from the Production Leadership Team to the Community Leadership kadra narodowa is effective immediately.

With a new year upon us, we welcome both Wendy and Ole to the team.

Some of Joomla 1.6's search engine optimization (SEO) improvements have been lost in the buzz of excitement about ACL (permissions) and nested categories. After all, these are very tiny, incremental improvements -- but for those working with SEO in Joomla, they will make a tremendous difference. We've just released a brand new template at Joomlashack.com called Impacto, and besides being a great all-purpose Joomla template perfect for any site, it's also the first-ever Joomla template designed to be a powerful Landing Page for your advertising campaigns!

You probably already know just how important an effective Landing Page is in today's ultra competitive, e-commerce-driven world. The right Landing page layout can increase your Adwords sales and keep visitors on your site longer. And that's why Impacto is so..impactful. Impacto enables you to build stunning landing pages right inside Joomla! using bold, rich typography, preset styles, and customizable layout options that present your message clearly and effectively.

On behalf of the Community Leadership Team, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Sandra Warren and Matt Lipscomb as our newest members.

Sandra has been instrumental in organizing a brand new reprezentacja narodowa to help with the beta launch of People Site.  As co-admin, her efforts have helped steer our community into new territory here on joomla.org and she's done a tremendous job of it.  Sandra and her team are now hard at work getting the People Site ready for its upcoming Official Launch.

Matt currently works on various Community Workgroup teams including the Site Showcase, Support Forums, JCM and the JRD.  He does an outstanding job in all.  Some of Matt’s more recent contributions include a discussion with the community to find ways to make JRD inclusion easier and the Joomla! Weekly Challenge which encourages people to contribute in various ways to the project and global community.

We think Sandra and Matt will be excellent additions to our ekipa and we thank them for taking on this added role to their current positions in the project.

Sandra, Matt... Welcome!

This is a report from the Joomla Leadership Summit now underway in San Jose, CA. Members of the Community Leadership ekipa (CLT), Production Leadership reprezentacja narodowa (PLT) and the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) are busy discussing the best foot forward in all areas of the project.

The PLT had our summit in the days leading up to the overall Leadership Summit. We'll share shortly the results of that summit, but we wanted to get some direct feedback from the community on an issue that affects many.

We decided to make a small change to the way Joomla versions are numbered. If you have read about the new development cycle, you know we now have a new Joomla version every six months and one long-term-support (LTS) release every 18 months. Versions 1.6 and 1.7 are six-month releases and the next release in January 2012 will be an LTS release. This way, users have a choice. They can get the latest and greatest version by updating with improvements every six months, or they can have a more stable feature set with updates every 18 months.  Maintenance and security releases will be done as necessary for both LTS and STS releases during their support periods.

To try to make this as clear as possible to users, we have decided that the long-term releases will always be labeled as x.5 releases. For example, 3.0 and 3.1 will be regular, short-term six-month releases. The following version would be 3.5, indicating that it is a LTS release. Version 3.5 will be supported for 18 months. In the meantime, we will release 4.0 and 4.1. The LTS replacement for 3.5 will be 4.5, 18 months later.

We would like to present two options to the community to decide how to proceed with this versioning approach. 

Click on the diagram above to view a larger version.

The first option (Option #1) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 1.8. The subsequent short -term releases would be 2.0 and 2.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 2.0.1 or 2.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 2.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because it would be the only version to not follow the x.5 numbering, but this version number would naturally follow 1.6 and 1.7.

The second option (Option #2) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 2.5. The subsequent short -term releases would be 3.0 and 3.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 3.0.1 or 3.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 3.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because there would be no version numbers between 1.7 and 2.5, but this version number would follow the future versioning strategy (also there would be backwards compatibility with Joomla 1.5).

Vote for the option that makes the best sense here:

http://tinyurl.com/jversion

 

 

 

 

 

The Joomla project recently reached its 10 millionth download of its popular CMS, a great milestone for the project, and in only 4 years.

Last year I estimated that over 30 million sites use Joomla, though obviously that number must be bigger now.

Interestingly enough, last month I also did some work breaking down the trends of 1.0 to 1.5 downloads of Joomla, you can see the results in this graph.

Join me at the 2nd annual Joomla Day in Vermont - June 5, 2010, 9 AM - 5 PM at Marlboro College, Marlboro, Vermont, USA Just 20 minutes west of Brattleboro, we're able to take up to 200 attendees for this year's conference. We'll be featuring internationally known members of the Joomla community, including:

Recently the Joomla Community Workgroup came up with an myśl to share just how much work is being done with the wider community by way of a monthly ekipa report. You can see the source of the combined report I have compiled below here.

It's an incredible snapshot of the 100's of volunteers working on this part of the Joomla Project. Thanks must also to go to the support OSM ( www.opensourcematters.org ) gives to our project, as well as the Joomla Production Workgroup.

Read on for the full report, it's amazing!

This has to be one of the best ways I have seen yet to explain web standards and usability to clients.

Next time you find your self in that situation, show this handy video.

Though it may not win any awards for innovative design, development consultant and Rotterdam School of Management professor Gregory Maassen's personal website is an excellent example of how Joomla provides a ton of accessible functionality.

developmentwork.net was built in Joomla 1.5x with a suite of free/Open Source extensions by Gregory himself.  As its main function was to serve as a repository for his publications, docman served well in easily creating an interface for organising file downloads and offering them up within articles as referenced links.

Some info about the site from Gregory's write-up on the Joomla forums:

It serves as an archive and introduction to my academic publications, and management experience with business development and judicial reform projects, legislative initiatives and educational programs in developing countries such as Afghanistan, Macedonia and Armenia.

The audience of the site is relatively limited:

• Students and other course participants who like to download materials;
• Other professionals who work in developing countries who may want to read some of my work and/or get inspiration to set up their own sites for their projects; and showcase what is possible with Joomla.

Its definately worth checking out the site and referring to his post on the forums describing the process by which he came to the right mix of extensions to create this site.

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Many K-12 schools find Simplweb's fully managed service a useful way to maintain their websites. Some higher education schools are also following the trend. The latest addition to the Simplweb family is the Upper Valley Educators Institute, a principal and teacher certification school of education.

Today I'd like to announce a new project by the Joomla! kadra narodowa called 'Joopal'. Joopal is a new CMS featuring the power of objects offered to you by Joomla! with the immense hook system delivered to you by Drupal. Joopal is based on Joomla! 1.5 and features Drupal 6 the way PHP5 meant it to be done: with objects instead of globals and incredibly long function names. Joopal is compatible with the Drupal 6 functions and maintains all of those globals for backwards compatibility whilst providing a new object orientated approach to the functions you know and love.

 

The power of Joomla! with Drupal configurability

Joopal permits you to use your traditional Drupal blocks anywhere a Joomla! module can do and also allows you to integrate Drupal's modules as if they were a normal Joomla! component. This permits your Joomla! site to pick and choose the features and functionality you need against two of the world's most popular content management systems!

 

Development Evolved

Joopal provides developers with the power of the Joomla! Web Application Framework as well as Drupal 6's many interfaces. Joopal allows Joomla! developers to leverage features found in Drupal and allows Drupal developers to discover the joys of objects. For Drupal developers, objects are a recently added to PHP in version 3 that permit encapsulation of your data and providing tools to permit the removal of globals from your code.

But it doesn't stop there! In addition to creating object orientated versions of the Drupal Core in addition to the function/global system, you can seemlessly use Joomla!'s Framework complete with on demand autoloading objects.  With two popular frameworks behind you, there is no way you can go wrong!

 

Getting Involved

Like Joomla!, Joopal is a community driven project and we need you to help us out! Joopal needs Drupal testers to help port their components and reveal issues with the system. Joopal also welcomes any developers wanting to fix issues and improve Joopal by submitting patches or even working in a more dedicated role. With Joopal and your involvement, anything is possible! So what are you waiting for, sign up the the Joomla! Development General mailing list and start working on Joopal today!

Follow Sam Moffatt on Twitter.