Since 2010 the VEL team have organised the Vulnerable Extensions List on behalf of the Joomla community. Since then the list has been hosted on the docs.joomla.org pages.The VEL team felt that now was the time to move the vel project onto its own website.

The Vulnerable Extensions List team is looking for new members.

Those interested do not need to know how to code or be a developer but they must be able to:

converse confidently in English

be able to test POC where applicable

have a proven record of assisting the Joomla community

This volunteer role requires only a little commitment but does require a lot of discretion as you may be dealing with exploits that will affect the joomla community as a whole.

For those interested please complete the expression of interest  form  by the 15th May 
 

For people wanting to blog about this week's release of Joomla 3.1, we have some marketing materials ready for you.

Here's the main image for Joomla 3.1. This image helps to show that the main feature of 3.1 is Tags.

Google’s Open Source offices have officially announced that there will be a Google Summer of Code Program this year. Because of the wild success of our projects with GSoC last year, the Joomla Community has again put together a team to mentor college / university students of any age for the summer. That team has already filled out the application for Google, and been approved by Google. This is happening, folks!

What’s on The Plate for This Year?

Last year had a major focus on the (then) Joomla Platform codebase. Six out of our seven projects were platform related. This year, we have almost the opposite so far in terms of project ideas. The CMS has quite a few more project ideas on our ideas list, which should mean great innovation and maybe some new features in the upcoming Joomla 3 releases. The CMS is an exciting place for people interested in working on innovative applications. New features like tagging and Bootstrap and new CMS only APIS have created a good infrastructure for new work and for extension developers to dig in and check out all the great new features available to them in the 3.0 series! Both being a student developer and mentoring will put you in the middle of exciting changes for 3.2, 3.5 and beyond.

Help Wanted

If you’re interested in helping with GSoC, mentoring a student, or you are a student, we’d love to hear from you. There are a few important ways that we need help this year. If you’re a programmer who just doesn’t have the time to take on mentoring a student and project (we’re all busy!) maybe you could just offer some assistance when a student has the need for some code to be tested by several different testers who can provide useful feedback.

If you are a programmer and you do have a bit of available time over the summer, we can always use more mentors. Even if you can’t commit to a full time mentoring position, just having someone available at the right time can make a difference. Just talk to us, we’ll find a way to work with your schedule and the time you have available. Of course, if you can commit to mentoring a project, we would love to hear from you too - don’t be shy!

Getting More Info

There’s a lot of information about GSoC out there, specific to Joomla and more general just for GSoC. Here’s a few links to help you out:

• GSoC
  • google-melenage
  • mentoring wiki
  • FAQ
• Joomla GSoC
  
  • 2012 Magazine Article
  • 2012 Students & Projects
  • Ideas page
  • Mentoring signup form (google)

To get in contact with the GSoC team, send an email to gsoc [at] opensourcematters.org

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

With the ever-increasing demand for content to be consumed across platforms and across devices, Joomla urgently needs a RESTful web services API.  It is no longer enough to just publish content on a website and expect people to use a web browser to access it.  Nowadays people want to consume content on smartphones, tablets and other devices, and they want to be able to connect information systems together to break out of the old content silos.  Joomla as a content management system (CMS) needs to be more open to new methods of publishing content and we need to think beyond the traditional web CMS to embrace the full extent of our mission "to provide a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration".

Today (Saturday, March 16th) is the gobal Pizza, Bugs, and Fun event.  It's an all-day, in every time zone, global event that's open to all virtual participants that are interested.  There will also be local venues wherever they are organized, including at Joomla!Day Boston.  The key goal is to fix as many Joomla 3 and Joomla 2.5 bugs as possible before Joomla 3.1's release, which will be on or around the 28th of March, and Joomla 2.5.10's release.

Last week (5-9 March 2013) Joomla was present at CeBIT 2013, the world's largest and most international computer expo in Hannover, Germany. We shared a booth called “CMS Garden” with 12 other open source content management systems (CMS). The idea behind this shared booth was to have all of the relevant open source content management systems all in one place. 

Two of those systems are, just like Joomla, in the top 3 of leading CMS systems: Wordpress and Drupal.

So who won?

I was poking around our very own Joomlacode.org site today and started looking at some recent download statistics. As you may know, reliable market share information for open-source CMS packages is hard to find, and it is especially difficult to assess recent trends. However, Joomlacode tracks all file downloads (including those from the one-click version updates), and these do provide some useful data. Here are some numbers I found interesting.

In the last six months (September 2012 – February 2013), we registered the following download counts for full packages (excluding the update packages):

• Joomla 2.5: 1,725,268 (about 288k per month)
• Joomla 3.0: 796,340 (about 133k per month)

During this period, we averaged about 420k downloads per month of our two flagship products.

It is almost time for Joomla 3.1 Beta and we wanted to give you a quick sneak-peek at the proposed new Tags feature to get you excited for it, which at this point looks like it will likely get in for Joomla 3.1 or at the latest for Joomla 3.2. Tags are a kind of meta-data that allow you to assign a keyword or keywords to a particular item. Since it's meta data, core and custom extensions could theoretically organize and display that meta-data in many different ways. For example, you might tag some contacts in Contact Manager as "Joomla Bug Squad" and do the same for some articles in Article Manager. You could then create a menu item (or use a module) to display, within a list, all the items tagged as "Joomla Bug Squad".

The spring time is drawing upon us, and for student developers, this is an exciting time of year. Google has again announced that it will be running the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. Continuing on the successes of previous years, the Joomla! Project will once again apply to participate in this program.

Consider this your invitation to join us on Saturday, the 16th of March, for Pizza, Bugs, and Fun.  It's an all-day global event that's open to all virtual participants that are interested.  There will also be local venues wherever they are organized, including at Joomla!Day Boston.  The key goal is to fix as many Joomla 3 and Joomla 2.5 bugs as possible before Joomla 3.1's release, which will be on or around the 25th of March, and Joomla 2.5.10's release.

This Bug Squash event is a great opportunity for intermediate to advanced users to learn how to contribute to Joomla bug fixes within the community.  You do not have to be an expert coder or even a coder to contribute;  all we ask is that you are familiar with running Joomla on your localhost before the event and that you consider yourself at least an intermediate user.  We will provide you with the help and documentation that you need to test the Joomla patches (i.e. fixes), so please join us this weekend and help us to make Joomla better!

Detailed information about the event can be found in the wiki at http://docs.joomla.org/Pizza_Bugs_and_Fun_March_16,_2013

To comment or discuss this post, go to http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=704&t=792880

The JUG Pune & JUG Mumbai had organised the 3rd Joomla! Day in Mumbai, and what an event it was! We had Ryan Ozimek, David Hurley, Ofer Cohen and  more than half a dozen speakers from various parts of India. We also had an enthusiastic audience from far corners, and all of them were more than willing to soak in every bit of the knowledge the community wished to impart. The Joomla Handshake #jhandshake too was ideated, you can view the video on Ryan's Vine.

The Africa Cup of Nations is one of the largest and most presitigious football tournaments in the world.

This year the tournament is being held for the 29th time and the venue is South Africa.

Over the last three weeks, 16 teams from across Africa have been competing. The final is being played on Saturday between Nigeria and Burkina Faso.

The official tournament website is http://www.afcon2013online.com and it uses Joomla.

Two new language features are added in Joomla! 3.0.3:

1. Installation of language packs when installing the CMS
2. Extension of items associations to remaining core components in multilanguage.

Installation of language packs when installing Joomla!

After implementing the installation of language packs through the Extension Manager since 2.5.7 ( See http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1668-first-time-in-joomla-history.html ), Javier Gomez completed his GSOC project by coding this new functionnality.

CMSGarden - The Open Source CMS Garden Festival at CeBIT 2013

In September 2012 I got a call from Stephan Luckow, who is President of the German Drupal Association called "Drupal-Initiative". He told me about his idea of presenting all interested Open Source content-managment-systems at a common stand at the CeBIT 2013 event. CeBIT is the world's largest IT trade fair and takes place in Hannover, Germany, from March 5 - 9, 2013. He asked me whether I would like to represent the Joomla! project during the planning phase and work as a "hub" to inform the national and international Joomla! community about the project called "CMSGarden" - and of course I agreed immediately.

One could ask why I agreed to help in the project. The answer is quite simple: I strongly believe that every single participating CMS can benefit a lot from it. CeBIT is the world's largest trade fair for computer and internet technologies and offers us a unique possibility to reach people who are using internet technologies in their business every day. But even more important to me is this: a common project of multiple Open Source systems helps everybody understand that we're not really competitors. Instead, we have to be aware of the fact that our real competitors are closed source systems still used in web projects all over the world. We are one "big family" and should exchange our ideas, opinions and lessons learned so that everyone can benefit.

Heathrow is the major London airport and, by some measures, is the busiest airport in the world.

For their main shopping site at http://boutique.heathrow.com, they needed a platform able to handle heavy traffic and showcase brands like Bulgari. They choose Joomla ...

The international Joomla conference is behind us. It is always great meeting people face to face. It is at moments like this that things, often discussed at length, can be quickly and effectively brought into focus.

In version 3.0, we have accessibility issues in the frontend as well as the backend. The goal should be to fix them step by step. It will not happen overnight.

For this reason, we have established a working group to work in cooperation with the UX working group. The long-term goal is to make Joomla the first CMS that is really compliant with the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines.

Through our discussions, two primary approaches have emerged: the development of accessibility guidelines, and the fixing of recognised accessibility issues.

In may 2010, the people.joomla.org website (PJO or JPeople), mainly built on Jomsocial, launched as a beta to see if the social media sides of joomla could be centralised. It also provided a home for the Joomla User Groups, developer fan clubs and various communication channels with the Joomla teams.

Recent changes on the joomla family sites such as Events team getting their own subsite, the JUG team relaxing the rule on forcing people to have a listing on PJO, Community blog posts discussions moving to the forum and with the impending release of 2.5 earlier this year, the moderation team asked the community for suggestions of how to improve the site.

In the 1.7 release of Joomla! was introduced a cool functionnality, Menu Items Associations for a Multilanguage site.

See: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1468-multilang-in-17-whats-new.html

It's a pleasure to announce here that Joomla 3.0.2 is bringing an improvement we have all been waiting for:

Items Associations

It is limited in 3.0.2 to the articles and article categories, but will be for sure extended to all core components (if someone codes it...   at Benjamin).

Compatibility with 2.5

 The new feature is backward compatible. One just needs to save again the parameters in the System Language Filter plugin and make sure all is fine for the already associated Menu Items.
The screenshots below are done from an updated Multilanguage demo site ( See 2.5 version here: http://multilingual-joomla-demo.cloudaccess.net/ )

How does it work?

1. Edit the System Language Filter plugin and make sure that Items associations is set to Yes

  2. Associating Articles Categories
When the parameter is set in the plugin, a new Associations tab displays when editing a category. All Content Languages display and a dropdown lets you choose for each of them among the categories set to that language.

3. For the categories for which association is implemented (Articles Categories for now), a new Association column will display in the Category Manager. Hovering the icon will display, as for Associated Menu Items, the associations implemented.

4. Associating Articles
A new Associations tab displays when editing an article. Clicking on the Select button will open a modal with all filters where one can choose an associated article in another content language.

5. A new Association column will display in the Article Manager. Hovering the icon will display the associations implemented for a specific article.

6. The interface is similar for menu items associations.

7. On the front-end, here is a page displaying a list menu item of a category set to en-GB. We have no menu items set to display the articles, but some articles are associated (the "Introduction" article shown above).

8. Let's click on the "Introduction" article

9. Then click on the French flag in the Language Switcher module. The associated article will display.

10. That's it! The behavior is similar for categories and menu items.

Who did it ?

We have here to thank Benjamin Trenkle who proposed code for this new feature in the feature tracker.

He is a freelancer and uses joomla most of the time for creating extensions and some templates for his customers.
He also created a club management component for joomla!
His site: http://www.wicked-chick.de/
 

Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank) is the biggest and most profitable bank in Nigeria. They are one of the biggest companies in Western Africa and have opened branches in Cote d'Ivorie, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom.

GTBank are also pioneers in mobile banking, so it's no surprise that their new website is mobile. And, what better choice is there for a mobile-ready website than Joomla? See their new Joomla site at http://gtbank.com.

The Mobile View of GTBank.com