The "Handboek Joomla!" is a 148 page magazine dedicated to Joomla that is just about ready to go to print. The Dutch Joomla community has worked together with some international community members on the issue. Over 40 people contributed in some way to this magazine, which is made made by the Dutch Webdesigner magazine.
The magazine will be available in 3.000 stores in the Netherlands & Belgium on March 3 and online via http://www.fnl.nl/design/design-specials.html (not yet available).
This is a huge achievement for the Joomla community on the region. Sander Potjer says they're considering an English version for later this year.
Today, I had a chat with Sander Potjer about the magazine.
- Sander, how did the Project come about?
We created two printed Joomla-magazines before, in 2012 and 2013. We did this in cooperation with Webdesigner magazine, which is a regular Dutch magazine about webdesign. The idea was originally born to be able to give the attendees of the Dutch JoomlaDays something to take home and read about, more then a regular program-booklet you receive at events. All attendees of the Dutch JoomlaDays and Joomla User Groups received these magazines for free, and it was available for order on our local Joomla foundation website.
These two magazines were a huge success, so when we we're sitting around a table with the publisher to discuss a new edition, the idea was born to not only make this magazine available for the Joomla community but anyone interested. This time 12.000 copies are printed, and will be for sale in 3.000 shops. The magazine itself will be tripled in size, 148 pages in total.
- When did you start the project?
We started in autumn 2014 with meetings with the publisher and creators of Webdesigner magazine to discuss the possibilities. To be able to cover the costs of the magazine we needed advertisers. So in October and November we reached out to Joomla-related companies to check their interest for advertising in the magazine. Luckily, we received great support by the community and we were able to reach our goal. Many thanks to these companies!
After that we discussed the content of the magazine in December with the Webdesigner magazine editors and started to reach out to the community for authors, who all write voluntary for the magazine. In January, all authors worked hard on their articles and workshops for the magazine, with a strict deadline at the end of January. After that others read over each article three times and suggested corrections. From the community side over 40 people contributed to this magazine.
Once this all was done the articles were send to the Webdesigner magazine editors who did final checks and all of the graphic work. On January 13th the magazine was sent to the printer.
Next week we will receive the first copies and it will be available in stores from March 3rd.
Can you mention some of the topics covered in the magazine?
This time the magazine will be available for anyone interested and not only those that know Joomla already. So the magazine will start with a general introduction, articles, interviews and showcase of Joomla websites. Followed up by a workshop to build your first Joomla websites which both the CMS as well as joomla.com can be used for.
The third part is the in-depth part with articles and workshops by Dutch Joomla-experts. Topics like building your own template, template overrides, Less, integrating Joomla, SEO, developing your own extension etc... These are just a few of the topics covered. The last part of the magazine is an introduction to our community with articles about the community in general, local and international events, user groups and the developer group.
The title of the magazine is "Handboek Joomla", which means "Handbook Joomla", a complete overview of the current state of Joomla for anyone!
- Thank you for sharing and good luck with the magazine!
Here are some pictures from the project room:
