A new Magazine for Joomla and its Community

By Luca Marzo on 2020-01-19 08:30 in Community Magazine Team

It has been a while since the last edition of the Joomla Community Magazine, the information and communication "tool" of the Project. It had a glorious history, being the place where people could find top trending news about the CMS and technologies, and ideas to improve their Joomla knowledge and helped the Community to flourish across the world with its international editions.

As a Community we should honor our Magazine giving it new life and energy and let it demonstrate what Joomla as CMS can do and unleash its potential.

The Plan

Every project should have a plan to be successful and the new Magazine has one.

1) Website refactoring

The current edition of the JCM uses Joomla 3.x and K2 to manage the articles in it. This setup comes from previous editions and required lot of efforts to manage. Several people collaborated, analysing the status and proposing different approaches to migrate to either Joomla-core only solutions or different components over the months. Rowan Hoskyns Abrahall worked hard to migrate the website from its technological stack to EasyBlog over Joomla 3.x core. And this is the foundation of the new JCM.

2) "A year in review" - The first, special edition

The first issue of the new magazine will be named "A Year in review" and will include reports from all the teams, across departments, to let teams present and report their annual activities and achievements and be acknowledged by the Community. A collection of reports, to show how many teams work daily to allow Joomla to be there and master the 3% of the entire web.

This is also the right chance to collect the reports of Department Coordinators and Officers of Open Source Matters, as mandated by the election policy, to increase communication and transparency.

This release is planned for early February 2020.

3) The Schedule

The Community Magazine would be released on a monthly basis, starting from March 2020 with regular content. Each edition will include also Caĺls for Volunteers and a Case Study of a Joomla website. The "Calls" will help the Community recruit new members to achieve the goals the teams defined for themselves and the "Case Studies" will allow the Community and people around the world how Joomla can do, see its potential, see that it can provide stunning web experiences.

The Joomla Community Magazine will always welcome articles and experiences from the Community, in-depth analysis, researching materials, events and reports from teams either global or local.

4) One language to have all languages.

Joomla Project's official language is English, but its Community is spread throughout the world, speaking plenty of different languages, and as CMS is "able to speak" lot of languages too. In the past, the Joomla Community Magazine used to host international editions like the Spanish one and others, as well as it hosted articles in different languages, perfectly mixed with the English content.

This time we want to unleash the power of the Local Communities and our team of fantastic translators that will help making the content of the magazine available to the entire world. The principle is simple: JCM will only publish content in English but such content will be translated and published by Local Communities directly on their websites. Links to translations will be included in the article on JCM and vice versa. And this move is a win-win because the content can be available in more than just 3 languages, because Local Communities will get more exposure and feel more included and they have also a stream of fresh, high-quality and original content to be provided to their audiences in their languages. This approach has been successfully introduced by Sandra Decoux, George Wilson for the CMS Release Notes and allowed the project to have much more than 3 languages.

Call for Authors

Authors are warmly welcomed and encouraged to submit their original articles to the Joomla Community Magazine. The magazine is the voice of the Community, a place where raise topics and share their findings with the others. Articles can flow in at every moment.
Contents sent after the 20 of each month will be generally included in the edition following the upcoming.

Call for Volunteers

The Community Magazine needs several Volunteers with a different skillset, to ensure a quality and timely release. Editors, Proofreaders, Authors are the key roles open for volunteers.

Thanks to everyone contributed so far

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, the Joomla Community Magazine had a glorious history and this has been possible only thanks to the huge effort given by a lot of Volunteers over the years: Nicky, Sandra, George, Jacques, Marc, Daniel, Patrick, Randy, Robert, Mark, Helvecio, Guillermo, Dianne, Alice, Olaf, Isidro, Carlos and many many others. Also a big thank to all the authors and contributors so far. Looking forward to have again you all on board to let the Magazine gain its place again!