Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 39, 2013:
- Marketing Materials for Joomla! 3.2
- Joomla 3.2 Video Tutorials
- PLT Membership Changes
- Call For Joomla! Community Leadership Team Nominations 2013
- Joomla! Documentation Has a New Look!
- Five Tips to Improve Website User Experience
- Composer for Joomla – An extension installer for developers
- DOCman 2.0 RC2 released
- DOCman 2.0 migrator released
- Introducing Ignite - Responsive Shop Template
Marketing Materials for Joomla! 3.2
Written by Sander Potjer
Yesterday the Joomla project released Joomla 3.2. Joomla 3.2 is truly a Something New for Everyone release. We have some marketing materials ready for you to share the exciting new features of Joomla 3.2.
We have created Joomla 3.2 banners in several sizes that you can use:
- Banner 160 x 600 px
- Banner 200 x 200 px
- Banner 240 x 400 px
- Banner 250 x 250 px
- Banner 300 x 250 px
- Banner 300 x 600 px
Written by Ryan Bernstein
There have been a record number of new features added to Joomla! 3.2 making today’s release the most functional and easy-to-use version of Joomla ever. With over 1,000 new commits coming from more than 50 different contributors, the much anticipated 3.2 version offers everything from UI/UX enhancements, version history and improved security measures.
Additionally, the long-awaited “app-store”, which has been nicknamed the “Joomla Extension Finder”, is now an optional feature of 3.2. The tutorials below include first hand descriptions and/or illustrations of several of the most popular new features given by the developers themselves.
Written by Javier Gomez
The Joomla! Production Leadership Team (PLT) is pleased to announce the addition of four new members: Don Gilbert, Matt Thomas, Roberto Segura, and Thomas Hunziker.
The PLT is responsible for leading and coordinating the development of the Joomla! CMS and the Joomla! Platform. This includes releasing new versions, fixing bugs, adding new features, translating and creating documentation.
In June 2013, the PLT announced that they were seeking nominations from the community for several new members to join the team, the original article can be seen here: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1753-now-always-open-for-plt-nominations.html. Many excellent candidates were nominated and the PLT took them all into consideration before making its decision.
With the addition of Roberto Segura, Don Gilbert, Matt Thomas and Thomas Hunziker, this brings the total PLT members to ten:
- Michael Babker
- Chris Davenport
- Don Gilbert
- Javier Gomez
Call For Joomla! Community Leadership Team Nominations 2013
Written by Peter Martin
The Joomla! Community Leadership Team (CLT) is currently looking for new active members from the Joomla community to strengthen our team. If you know a fellow Joomla community member who is active in the Joomla.org or in a local Joomla community, and who would be available & suitable for the position, please nominate them. You can also nominate yourself. If you are nominating someone else, please make sure that you've asked their permission. Please keep in mind that this is *not* a voting contest: asking all your acquaintances to nominate or vote for you, certainly doesn't give you any bonus points :-)
What is the CLT?
The Community Leadership Team (CLT) is the leadership arm of the project responsible for the Community Workgroup (CWG). The Community Workgroup (CWG) consists of certain sites/areas where hundreds of volunteers help out:
Joomla! Documentation Has a New Look!
Written by Tom Hutchison
The Documentation Working Group is pleased to announce a new look for Joomla! Docs. For the past two months, a select few have been working on improving the look and feel of our docs. Some of the changes will be immediately apparent, such as:
- All our content is now front and center, with no distractions or clutter. The navigation is now enhanced with new drop down menus.
- Did I say, “drop down menu” above? Yes, I most certainly did! Drop down menus across the top exist now and they will continue to be enhanced.
- The new design is totally responsive and in case you don’t know what that means, docs is now mobile ready!
The Docs Team is still working on structuring docs better while it continues to improve content and archive out-dated articles. A special thanks to all those who have been helping out with suggestions and actually contributing to the article improvements. All this work brings us closer and closer to the next task, localising our docs!
Five Tips to Improve Website User Experience
Written by Ryan Pierson
Your website is more than just a place to promote your brand and/or products. It’s arguably the single largest point of contact your customers may have with your business, outside of a brick and mortar storefront. It’s where you make your initial pitch to new visitors, share information with your community, and drive traffic to places you’d like your visitors to go.
That’s why it’s of utmost importance that your new visitors have a pleasant user experience from the moment they find you in a search engine to the day after they made their initial visit. Think of your website as an extension of your business’ services rather than a billboard. Your visitors are customers walking through the front door, asking questions, and seeing what your site has to offer.
Regardless of what type of business you’re in, your website is often the first real opportunity you have to establish a relationship with potential customers. This experience should be free of confusion, and leave a lasting impression.
Composer for Joomla – An extension installer for developers
Written by Johan Janssens
Are you a developer and tired of reinstalling the same extensions over and over again every time you start a new Joomla project? Wouldn’t it be great if you could install and update multiple Joomla extensions in one go, without lifting a finger?
If you create websites for clients on a regular basis you require tools that allow you to get things done quickly and automatically. That’s why we have created a Composer installer for Joomla extensions.
What is Composer?
Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. You can instruct Composer to pull in all the required extensions you need in your site using a single JSON file. This will keep all your dependencies in one convenient location and Composer will take care of upgrading and managing them.
Composer has become the de-facto standard for managing dependencies in the PHP community today. Because of its ease of use and community-wide support, it’s simply the best tool to manage extensions for a Joomla setup.
Written by Johan Janssens
We are pleased to announce the release of the second release candidate of DOCman 2.0. This is a stability release that focuses on fixing smaller issues in preparation of the final 2.0 release.
DOCman 2.0 is production ready and used by many sites already. For an overview of all features also check our previous DOCman 2.0 Alpha, Beta and Beta 3 and RC1 announcements.
This release features 21 fixes for smaller issues and common problems encountered by our customers. For the complete changelog check our site.
Notable fixes
- Add document button in frontend was not working in all cases.
- Joomla 3.1.5 broke DOClink button.
- Some PHP installations were not correctly ordering files.
- Table layout ordering was broken in frontend.
- Better permission checks when creating DOCman folders.
- “Open in new tab” setting is fixed for all views.
- Maximum uploadable file size is calculated correctly for all PHP installations.
- Google Document Viewer is now working well with .docx files.
Written by Johan Janssens
We are happy to announce that the migrator for DOCman 2.0 is ready and available. The migrator provides a fluent process to migrate your DOCman 1.6.x categories and documents to DOCman 2.0 on either Joomla 2.5 or 3.x.
We made sure the migrator is capable of working with very large data sets and has a very small footprint so that it can work on all servers without issues.
You can download the migrator from Joomlatools member center and use our instructions to migrate your site to the brand new DOCman 2.0 release now.
Introducing Ignite - Responsive Shop Template
Written by Anthony Olson
I'm very happy to announce the release of our November Joomla template - Ignite. Ignite is a super clean and classy ecommerce template that comes with a fully fleshed out and quite lovely theme for Hikashop.
We will also be releasing a Virtuemart theme suited for Ignite but I wanted to release this earlier so you could see the full glory.
This is the first time I've worked with Hikashop and I must say it was a really very good experience. The workflow, flexibility and functionality in the free version of the extension seemed to be really well thoughtout and easy to follow. The Pro version looks even more feature rich so I guess you need to really need to make the decision on which version to use based on your project. Checkout the comparison table here.
