Thanks for using Joomla and Joomlashack.
Every month we post a round-up of news from around the Joomla community. Our May version is a few days later than normal, because of some big Joomla 4 news! Here's our guide to what's interesting in Joomla right now.
I try to post one of these helpful items every day in the Joomlashack Facebook group, so join if you do want daily Joomla updates.
Joomla 4: Release Candidate 1
This is big news! Joomla 4 is much closer now. This version of Joomla 4 is not ready for production websites, but it's not far away. The plan is to publish a new Release Candidate every two weeks until the stable version is ready.
See the official Release Candidate announcement.
A New Extension to Read Site Logs
4Logs is a very helpful new extension from Yannick Gaultier over at Weeblr. It finds all the log files on your site and makes it easy to browse them inside your Joomla admin area. I'm going to be recommending this to our customers to help with bug-shooting.
Download the free 4Logs extension.
Videos from Joomla User Groups
Some Joomla User Groups that have continued producing great talks during COVID. And they're putting the videos on YouTube. Shout out to Joomla Australia and to Joomla London. Here's the latest from Joomla London, featuring Victor Drover from Watchful.
Watch the video from Joomla London.
Joomla and Google's New Tracking
The Joomla team have a new post explaining how they are tackling Google's new advertising technology called FLOC. There's a Yes/No setting available to every site, starting with 3.9.27. By disabling FLOC, you are not helping Google to profile your users.
Private Messages in Joomla
I saw a conversation on X / Twitter about the Private Messages extension. It's a confusing feature in Joomla, so we updated our blog post explaining what it is and how you can use it.
What is the Joomla messaging extension?
Laura Gordon Interview
This Joomla Magazine does a great job of interviewing key Joomla people. The latest issue has an interview with Laura Gordon, one of our very favorite Joomla people. She just helped to organize a successful Joomla Day USA. Read about how Laura learned and works with Joomla and what she does in the community and more.
Read the interview with Laura.
Introduction to the VS Code editor
This article is a really neat, quick introduction to the VS Code editor. It's more than a text editor, it's a one-stop solution for everything related to development. If you want to go further with VS Code, you can check out this video we posted a few weeks back.
Click here to see the VS Code tutorial.
How to Execute a PHP script when an Article is Saved in Joomla
One Joomlashack user asked what would be the best way to execute a PHP script when an article is saved in the Joomla admin. He got some great advice from the Joomlashack community.
See the Facebook conversation on extending Joomla.
Joomla's plans for Google Summer of Code
Many great Joomla features have come from the Google Summer of Code program. The Joomla team's plans for 2021 are now out:
- A GDPR cookie manager
- Better keyboard navigation
- Image optimization
- Frontend text editing
Read more about the Google Summer of Code plans.
Show All Joomla Articles With a Specific Tag
In this tutorial, we show you how to create a module showing all the content that has a particular Joomla tag. This process is a little confusing, but the end result can be very helpful.
See the tutorial on creating a module with tagged articles.
Bootstrap 5 is Now Stable
A couple of months ago, we covered the decision to move to Bootstrap 5 for Joomla 4. It's good to see that the official release of B5 is now here. It's just in time for Joomla 4!
Read the Bootstrap 5 launch post.
Responsive Images in Joomla articles
This is a very helpful content plugin that enables you to use truly responsive images inside Joomla. The plugin automatically creates different-sized copies of your images: large copies for desktops and small copies for mobile. It also updates your site's markup to use the HTML5 image tag srcset. This feature is part of the WordPress core.
See the new responsive images extension.
Other Joomlashack updates
Here are other updates and tutorials from the Joomlashack team in May: