Sandbox::https://magazine.joomla.org

The October Issue

Details: Written by: Anja de Crom

54 magazine issues.
108 magazine meetings.
30+ JCM Happiness Talks (see interview in this edition of the magazine).
182 articles written.
958 articles edited and/or reviewed.

And this, the October issue, is where it ends for me. This magazine issue will be my last as a Team Leader. I will stay on as a member of this wonderful team, but the team will have a new leader: the awesome Louise Hawkins. Isn’t that… you may wonder - yes it is: the same Louise Hawkins who won the J!Award for the best magazine article of the year. So from now on, your very own magazine has an Award Winning Team Leader!

Joomla World Conference: Connecting People, Code, and Communities

Details: Written by: Anja de Crom

Put 150 Joomlers together in a conference hotel for three days, and what do you get? Interesting talks and presentations. Morning runs (exactly 6.2 kilometers long; nice touch). Lots of food and sweet treats. A brand new Joomla Anthem. But above all: friends.

Now it Runs Without You

Details: Written by: Weno Ndum Billy Hans

Somewhere on your site there is an article that should have been archived weeks ago. Not because anything is wrong with it, but because archiving it was someone's job to remember, and people do not remember. This summer I taught Joomla to do that part itself, and this is how it works.

Blog Posts: How long is too long?

Details: Written by: Brian Teeman

How long should a blog post be?

It's a question that gets asked a lot, and AI and the internet seem confident that they have the answer. Depending on which article you find or which AI you ask, you'll be told that 600 words is enough, that 1,500 words is the sweet spot, or that you should be writing 2,500 words because apparently Google likes long articles.

The question isn't really how many words an article should contain. The question is how much effort you're asking somebody to make in order to read it.

Joomla & Astroid: It Takes Two to Tango (Part 1)

Details: Written by: Paul Staub

I waste a lot of time on details and was thrashing around for ideas for a title for my follow-up Astroid article. Things like "Astroid & Joomla Is the Ultimate Creative Unlock" or "I'm Not Building It, Astroid Is". In the end I went with "It Takes Two to Tango", because that's what this is really all about: Joomla and Astroid, working together. And in the little corner of the planet where I live, there is an expression, "Nägel mit Köpfen machen", which roughly means "just do it". What follows is a brief detour, but it gives us important context.

The Questions We've Always Wanted to Ask: A Farewell Interview with Anja de Crom

Details: Written by: Claudia

After six years with the Joomla Community Magazine, first as an author and editor and later as Team Lead, Anja de Crom is preparing for a new chapter, taking on responsibilities within the Joomla community's Volunteer Engagement team.

To mark the occasion, the magazine team came together for a rather special farewell interview. Instead of the usual questions, we invited our authors to ask Anja the things they'd always wanted to know.

The result? A conversation full of memories, reflections and perhaps a few surprises!

Adding a service via the MVCFactory

Details: Written by: Herman Peeren

Joomla injects a database, a form factory and a handful of other tools into your controllers, models and views. Those tools are first put into the MVCFactory, which hands them over to your MVC objects. But what if your model needs some other tool that is not provided by the core? In this article I’ll show you how it was done up to Joomla 6.1, the new way in Joomla 6.2, and a proposal for 6.3 that lets Joomla do all the wiring.

When the developer goes quiet: adopting an extension nobody is maintaining

Details: Written by: Philip Walton

What do you do when the biggest extension on a client's site stops being looked after? Not a little module tucked away in a sidebar, but the thing the whole site exists to run: years of courses, thousands of learners, certificates people have worked hard to earn. This year we found out. The developer stopped answering, the releases stopped coming, and Joomla 6 arrived without them.

Interview with Ufuk Avcu – OSM Treasurer

Details: Written by: Nadja Lamisch

To mark Ufuk Avcu’s re-election to the Board of OSM, we spoke with him about his last term as treasurer and his plans for the new one. A long-time member of our community and a familiar name especially in the German-speaking Joomla world, Ufuk has previously contributed in marketing and has now been re-elected to continue his service, taking on the role of Treasurer. We’re grateful to him for accepting this important responsibility and for sharing his thoughts in this follow-up conversation.

Breadcrumb Navigation: Small Links, Big Benefits for Your Website

Details: Written by: Louise Hawkins

You've probably encountered breadcrumb navigation hundreds of times without giving it a second thought. Those little trails of links near the top of a webpage might seem insignificant, but they can play an important role in helping visitors find their way around a website.

Joomla Day of Code: A Non-Coder's Perspective

Details: Written by: Anne Garger

Joomla Day of Code – Presented by Laura Gordon, Olivier Buisard and Robin Clapp at Rutgers University on August 27, 2026

Although I have developed websites with Joomla for over 10 years, I realise I still have much to learn about how to help my clients make their websites more useful to them and to their own clients. I maintain websites on other platforms, but Joomla is my preferred CMS because of the ease and efficiency with which it lets me do just about everything.

Working with J2Commerce? Join the J2Commerce User Group!

Details: Written by: Jose Suarez

For years I’ve been building online stores on Joomla. Real stores, with real customers, real orders, and real problems that show up late at night. And every time I got stuck, I felt a little alone, digging through old forum posts and testing fixes on a staging site, hoping they’d work.

I knew I couldn’t be the only one. Store builders all over the world were solving the same problems on their own. So we decided to solve them together.

The Story of the Second Joomla PBF in Iran - Joomla in Iran Comes Together Again

Details: Written by: Morteza Honar

Every culture has its own events, and the PBF event can be understood within the same framework: a cultural event in the world of Joomla.

The PBF event is where we Joomlers from all over the world, with different languages and cultures come together. This gathering fades the borders; it turns us from "strangers" to "acquaintances" for one another, and creates an opportunity to see each other more positively and build Joomla together.

Joomla 8: The Roadmap Continues – Join the Online Sprint

Details: Written by: Benjamin Trenkle

The Joomla 8 roadmap is not going to implement itself. Unfortunately, it has not learned to write PHP yet.

In September 2025, Joomlers came together to discuss the next steps for Joomla 8. The result was a roadmap of features to improve Joomla and prepare it for the future.

Since then, work has progressed. Some features have already been implemented, while others still need attention. There is plenty left to do.

Using Grafida To Edit My Website Content On The Desktop

Details: Written by: Dan Atrill

Grafida is a cross-platform desktop application that enables a user to create and edit content without having to login to their Joomla website.