Joomla blog posts from around the web (15/13)

VEL Team volunteers needed

Written by Mandville

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 commitmentment 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.

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Marketing Materials for Joomla 3.1

Written by Steve Burge

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.

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It’s GSoC Time!

Written by Chad Windnagle

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.

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Kickstarting web services in Joomla

Written by Chris Davenport

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".  The rise of REST APIs can be seen as being part of the trend towards leveraging web technologies to liberate data and expose it to access by many different devices on many different platforms; allowing it to play a more dynamic role in business and organisational processes.

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Joomla! 3.1 - Dynamic Tagging Across Content Types

Written by Nick Savov

It is our privilege and pleasure to announce the immediate release of Joomla! 3.1. The biggest feature of Joomla 3.1 is Tags, a built-in tagging system chiefly engineered by Elin Waring and Mark Dexter. However, it’s not just any kind of tagging, it’s dynamic tagging across content-types.

Basically, we didn’t just create tags for articles, but rather we integrated tagging into other areas of the Joomla core that made sense (e.g. contacts, feeds, etc). For example, Tags allow you to create lists, blogs, or other layouts that combine articles with other content types any way you’d like. Not only that, but you can dynamically create the tags from the content, without having to navigate to the Tags component, thus bringing you both power and simplicity.

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Community Challenge: Let's Finance GNOME!

Written by Alice Grevet

Last week the opportunity to support women in tech was presented in a blog entitled Joomla & GNOME Partner Up for an Internship for Women. On behalf of the Joomla project, the board of Open Source Matters, Inc., pledges to match, dollar for dollar, the total amount raised by community sponsors. If enough sponsors step up to fund $5700 to cover one internship, the project will fund a second internship.   As of today's date, $300 have been raised. Let’s see what we can do together! We have until May 1 to take a stand with Joomla to encourage more women in computing!

Become a Sponsor!

We are looking for community sponsors who could donate towards the internship fund since GNOME requires $5,000 stipend for each internship, as well as $500 travel allowance, and $200 administration fee.

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Afterburner2: A Fast Free Feature-Rich Joomla Template

Written by Andy Miller

Whenever the topic of Joomla template frameworks comes up, the big names get bandied around, along with a few less well-known solutions. Inevitably, Gantry is mentioned, and usually in disparaging tones along with adjectives such as "heavy", "bloated", and "slow.” I think this generally stems from a lack of education and understanding about what Gantry brings to the table, how it performs tasks, and how to get the best out of it.

I recently replied to one such conversation on LinkedIn. If you're interested, you can read more about it there.  Afterburner2, which we released last week, started off as an experiment in which we wanted a clean design that still offered all the power of the Gantry framework while showcasing that Gantry could in-fact be very fast. What started out as a simple modern design resulted in a fully-responsive template with full Bootstrap support, multiple presets, and module variations, while still maintaining the power of configurability that Gantry provides.

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Introducing Motion - Parallax Joomla 3 Template

Written by Anthony Olson

I can't tell you how excited I am about this release and not just because it's a killer design - Motion is the first theme in the history of the club that we have released ahead of schedule. Seems like we worked overtime this month with the release of Arcadia, Blankoshop and the update of Koan to Joomla 3 Template compatibility but it doesn't mean we cut any corners with this release.

Motion is an elegant implementation of that now ubiquitous parallax scrolling effect that has been in vogue this year, last year and perhaps even the year before.

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JB Type is just a little bit more (font) awesome

Written by Anthony Olson

I've just released JB Type v1.8 which adds the new font icons found in Font Awesome v3.  Font Awesome 3 adds some nice new features and icons:  

• Optimised (even more) for use with Bootstrap
• 28% Smaller payload
• Plus 40 new icons

Checkout the new styles available on the main Font Awesome page and the JB Type syntax used to render them below.  Enjoy!

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Koan Joomla 3 Template now available

Written by Anthony Olson

We are slowly starting to update our older themes to Joomla 3 template compatibility (after a little bit of a break) and so I am very happy to announce that the Koan template, released in September 2012 as a part of our building block templates series is now available as a Joomla 3 / T3 compatible template.

The T3 version of Koan offers some incredible improvements which include:      Integrated Mega Menu

• Granular control over module widths across 5 device widths.
• Off Canvas Responsive menu
• Powerful theme options via Theme Magic
• Zenkit v2 compatible

If you are unfamiliar with Koan check out the demo of the original version or just head straight to the download area and grab a copy.

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An almost blank responsive Virtuemart template

Written by Anthony Olson

Hot on the heels of the release of the Arcadia template a few days ago, I have just released a new starter theme for Virtuemart.  Blankoshop is based on the Blanko template we released last September, and it's our first foray into the world of Virtuemart templates for quite some time.

It's a clean and minimal Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3 responsive template that we created for you to use as a fresh starting point for your next  ecommerce masterpiece  ... Or for those of you that like to keep things a little more zen, Blankoshop is a pretty, minimal Joomla template with a ton of white space and powerful features under the hood.

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Joomla 3.1.1 now available - 11 tracker issues resolved

Written by Ron van Schaik

Joomla 3.1.1 Stable has been released.  Most notable in this build is a fix for an issue where the database may not upgrade properly.  There is also the of another 10 items from the bug tracker including some fixes for the new tags feature.  Full details can be found in the official 3.1.1 release announcement at joomla.org, at the time of this post the link to the release notes were not updated, theses are the actual 3.1.1 release notes  This release is a simple bug fix release, but we recommend that users perform an Joomla upgrade immediately if they are not yet in version 3.0.4 or 3.1.0.

If you are unable to perform the recommended update to Joomla 3.1 the project has also made Joomla 3.0.4 available for manual installation, it is exactly the same as Joomla 3.0.3, except for the 7 security fixes.  Users of sh404SEF® should install the latest version of sh404SEF® before upgrading to Joomla 3.1.1, see the sh404SEF® 4.1 release announcement for details.

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Joomla upgrade 2.5.11 now available - 5 issues resolved

Written by Ron van Schaik

Joomla 2.5.11 has been released.  Notable in this build is the inclusion of a fix for a problem where an error in Database tab in Extension Manager did not reflect the Joomla 2.5.10 update  5 items from the bug tracker were addressed.  Full details can be found in the official 2.5.11 release announcement at joomla.org  A big THANK YOU goes out to the production team for addressing these issues quickly.  A Joomla upgrade can be performed directly in the Joomla administrative backend. For users with multiple sites, we recommend updating all your sites from Watchful.li — a centralized site manager for Joomla.

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Joomla 3.1.0 Stable now available - 7 security issue resolved

Written by Ron van Schaik

Most notable in this build among new features is the long awaited Tags feature as descibed by Nick Savov's community post Tag you're it  There is also the important inclusion of 7 low and medium priority security patches for information disclosure, XSS, DOS and privilege escalation vulnerabilities affecting versions 3.0.3 and earlier versions of 3.0. In addition 38 items from the bug tracker were also addressed.

Full details can be found in the official 3.1.0 release announcement at joomla.org  Since this release improves security, we recommend that all users perform an Joomla upgrade immediately. If you are unable to perform the recommended update to Joomla 3.1 the project has also made Joomla 3.0.4 available for manual installation, it is exactly the same as Joomla 3.0.3, except for the 7 security fixes.

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Joomla upgrade 2.5.10 now available - 7 security issue resolved

Written by Ron van Schaik

Joomla 2.5.10 has been released.  Notable in this build is the inclusion 7 low and medium priority security patches for information disclosure, XSS, DOS and privilege escalation vulnerabilities affecting versions 2.5.9 and earlier versions of 2.5.  38 items from the bug tracker were also addressed.  Full details can be found in the official 2.5.10 release announcement at joomla.org  Since this release improves security, we recommend that all users perform an Joomla upgrade immediately.  A Joomla upgrade can be performed directly in the Joomla administrative backend. For users with multiple sites, we recommend updating all your sites from Watchful.li — a centralized site manager for Joomla.

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Changes in Joomla 3.1 may affect extension installation

Written by Jessica Dunbar

Joomla 3.1 was released yesterday and some important elements — including the installer — have been renamed and/or moved without a deprecation period.  In some cases, this may result in errors in the Joomla installer when sh404SEF® v4.0 (or earlier) and other Joomla add-ons are used.  Importantly, even if you experience this issue, the rest of the Joomla frontend and backend operate normally, and the solution is to simply install sh404SEF® 4.1 (or later).

sh404SEF® 4.1 was released moments ago to accommodate the Joomla 3.1 changes. 

However, if you already updated your site to Joomla! 3.1 before installing latest sh404SEF®, and since this issue is characterized by a errors in the installer, you may have to use the following workaround:

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