The development of Joomla 4 and JED4 is progressing well. For us, it implies a renewal of the practices to the current times. Today, we introduce the specific support of Cloud Services and SaaS extensions.

When JED was originally created, the ecosystem consisted of simple components, modules, and plugins. Nowadays, the average size of an extension has increased and there are even extensions peaking at 15 MB. On top of this, the cloud has evolved and Joomla sites are now frequently integrated with independent cloud services.

We have realised that our current rules and decision-making processes needed a review to better support these extensions, so we’ve introduced a new ruleset for cloud-based business models.

The GPL license still applies to the distributed extension files, but the subscription models offered by cloud service providers can vary - a number of examples are listed in the rules below.

These are the new rules for Cloud Services / SaaS extensions:

List C2.3: Entries bridging to Cloud Services / SaaS

The full checklist can be found here: https://extensions.joomla.org/support/knowledgebase/item/jed-entries-checklists/

Do you want to collaborate with JED?

Most of the time, we are reviewing new extensions and looking for ways to improve the site. If you want to give us a hand, please, join the team to collaborate and help the community.

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash

If you want to change colors, font properties, spacing, backgrounds and other design features, adding a custom CSS file is the answer.

If you're using Protostar as template and want to tweak the look, don't edit template.css, instead use this cool feature available since Joomla 3.5 to load your own CSS file.

Let's start...

Step 1. Create a new CSS file

The file we will create should be named "user.css", so Protostar can load it automatically.

• Go to Extensions
• Templates
• Templates (button on the left)

• Protostar Details and Files

Here you can create template overrides and create new files.

• Click in New file button.

• Select the css folder
• Choose “css” as File type
• Type “user” as File name
  
• Click Create button

A successful message will confirm the creation of a new file where you can safely add your customisations in order to change the design of Protostar, the default Joomla template.

Step 2. Edit the new CSS file

• Edit the file user.css, located inside the css folder.
• On the right side of the screen, add your own custom CSS.
• Click Save when you’re done.

In my example, I’m increasing the size of the text using the font-size and line-height properties.

Step 3. End result

Visit the public face of your site. Protostar will automatically detect and load our custom code.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the text is bigger which means my tweaks are working. It doesn’t look good, but is enough to illustrate how the loading of custom CSS works in the default Joomla template.

On Thursday 27 December 2018, the Extension Directory Team (JED) had an election for the team leader. Anibal Sanchez has been elected as new Team Leader, taking over from Jaz Parkyn who is moving to her new role as Assistant Team Leader.

The objectives of the new period will be a continuation of the previous efforts:

• Focus on putting into action a consistent process of collaboration,
• Understanding the difficulties of finding the time to collaborate,
• Being precise and organized to inspire other volunteers and the general community of extension developers.
• Communicating a positive message, and
• Supporting the ecosystem growth in the right direction.

In the previous term, the team had many successes, as a brief list of our achievements:

• Design improvements have been published, based on JED Dev Team collaboration (Kudos Peter and Ciaran).
• We kept as a quality management indicator (KPI) the “7-days processing window” of all new extensions and tickets.
• The JEDCA development agreement has been removed as a requirement for JED4 collaboration.
• SEO Improvements have been applied to the site (Kudos Chris).
• The new server for the Review Checking Process is fully operational.
• Migration to Github and New JED 4 Dev Collaboration, the new JED4 CD/ CI workflow is fully operational.
• The first stage of JED Full-Text/ Instant Search has been implemented.

We are very grateful to all those who have contributed, applause to everyone in the team for their hard work this year.

Thank you, Jaz, for all you have done as Leader and your renewed commitment as Assistant Leader, and welcome to Anibal as the new JED Leader.

Joomla is charged with many options to make your website flexible and powerful. Those features are ready to cover specific needs, integrate new capabilities and make the content much easier to manage.

In this post I will share with you some tips that are worth taking the time to learn.

Speed up your website

Improving the speed is part of the list of basic requirements from any developer. We are talking about the time a website can take to load.

This result depends on many factors, such as number of images, CSS files, javascript files, and other files that a site loads for every page.

Try the following tip to enable cache and page compression:

Go to System > Global configuration > System > Cache: ON (start with Conservative caching then try Progressive)

System > Global configuration > Server > Gzip Page Compression: yes

Save and close

The improvement is not specific for all the sites; but is possible to make your site load 50% faster.

Protostar with full page width layout

By default, the protostar template comes with a boxed layout. To use the full width version, go to:

Extensions > Template manager > Protostar - default > Advanced > Fluid Layout: fluid

Save and close

Header tag for module titles

To change the tag that wraps the module title:

Extensions > Module manager > Your module > Advanced > Header tag. Choose: h1, h2, h2, h4, h5, h6, p or div.

Save and close

Note: this feature may work or not depending on the template you are using.

Save javascript in Custom HTML modules

Do you want to include javascript or iframe tags without getting stripped out after saving? Try this:

System > Global configuration > Default Editor: CodeMirror or None

Save and close

Then edit your module from Extensions > Module manager > Your custom HTML module.

Language overrides

If you need to customize the text from buttons or labels, look to the language manager:

Extensions > Language manager > Overrides > New

• In the search form type the text you want to translate, for example: “Read more”
• Click in the search button
• Locate the string you want to customize from the results
• In the left side of the screen edit the Text field
• Save and close

Versions: Ctrl + Z for articles

Joomla 3 allows to switch back to a previous version of an article.

Content > Article manager > Your article > Versions (button on top)

• Check one of the available versions
• Click restore
• Save and close

Enable menu editing in frontend

Edit your menu items starting from the public site:

System > Global configuration > Mouse-over Edit Icons for: modules & menus

Save and close

• Login in your frontend with a super user account.
• Place the cursor over the menu item, for example: “Home”.
• Click on the pencil icon to be redirected to the edit page in backend.

Voting for articles

Your articles can receive ratings. To enable that functionality go to:

Content > Article manager > Options > Show voting: show