Some of Our Favorite Joomla Community Projects

With 109+ million downloads, 1500+ volunteers and powering 2+ million websites Joomla is a compelling platform to build websites and applications alike. While most of the contributors are working on making Joomla better, there are people who are working on some exciting side projects which would make their way into Joomla at some point.  

Students from Google’s “Summer of Code” (GSoC) program have been involved for the past several years to work on these interesting projects. And the developers from the community have been great mentors to these students. 

In this blog, we’re talking about a few such projects.

Popular and Exciting Joomla Community Projects

Joomla! 4 alternative backend template

This repository is a much-appreciated community initiative to create an alternate backend template for Joomla! 4.

The project began as an initiative by Kawshar Ahmed on Facebook. Later on, the Joomla production department has agreed to incorporate the template when it is ready. Of course, for that to happen, the alternative will still need to be held up to the same standards and requirements as the current template.

The team also advised a set of initial top-level requirements, including:

• Ensure b/c for third-party extensions
• The template should be responsive, should work on all screen sizes and supported browsers
• It should have menus that should be manageable and editable through the menu manager
• The template should not include jquery or other JS-frameworks 

Github Link: https://github.com/joomla-projects/j4adminui 

Joomla GSoC 2019 Project: Page Builder

An upgrade over WYSIWYG editors, page builders are a great way to quickly build pages using ready to use “blocks” like text with typography, images, and videos. Most page builders will bundle several blocks so that content creators can quickly get up to speed. This project is an attempt to create a Page Builder for Joomla 4.  

The main focus lies on an editor, which makes it possible to create custom-defined positions with the help of a drag & drop GUI. Users can use predefined ts - container, grid, column, module position as well as custom elements. 3rd party developers are able to add their own elements via plugins.

Read more about the Google Summer of Code project 

Github Link: https://github.com/joomla-projects/gsoc19_page-builder 

Webservices / APIs

This is a project that has been around for several years. Webservices or APIs allow Joomla to connect with external systems which can vastly extend the kind of uses. Eg: You can use APIs post an article from an external system, or use APIs to build mobile apps and also a JavaScript frontend for Joomla. I’ve spoken several times in the past about how we use com_api to do that. The most recent presentation from the online Joomla Day can be found here. 

The webservices project itself has been worked on as part of at least 3 GSoC projects in the past, and each project has improved on the previous one either in the form of code or new learnings. The latest contribution that happened in GSoC 2019 has been very good, with support for APIs being added for most of the core extensions. 

Being built as part of Joomla 4, the webservices project is an attempt to bring APIs natively into Joomla. It works as a separate “application”, and developers can expose REST APIs for their extensions very easily. For more technical details, this Github page has good details, including suggestions to read up the past GSoC project details. 

Github Link: https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/tree/4.0-dev/api

Joomla Browser (for testing automation)

Joomla Browser is a Codeception.com module that allows building system tests for a Joomla website faster by offering a set of predefined tasks. The project has several available features across Joomla installation, administration, and more. 

A few functions are extension management (with the ability to install extensions from a folder, install extensions from URL, enable plugins, uninstall extensions), administrator UI (with the ability to select option is chosen, select option in radio field, select multiple options in chosen), checking for PHP notices and warnings, and more.

Several other methods are constantly being added to the Joomla Browser. Joomla Browser also comes with a toolset added through robo.li. See Joomla Browser in action here.

Github Link: https://github.com/joomla-extensions/weblinks#tests

Media manager improvements 

This project improves the existing media manager with new features and technologies. The project began late November 2016 and had a lot of interesting features on the roadmap. As of today, the project is not evolving independently. However, a lot of the improvements have already made their way into Joomla 4. Further enhancements are directly happening in Joomla 4. 

Here are a few exciting features as part of this project-

• Drag and drop image upload
• Resize, Crop and rotate images

Summary

The Joomla community loves creating new solutions that address the need of businesses as well as the want for innovation. We are extremely proud and excited to be a part of such a vibrant community and look forward to contributing to it. 

Do you have any such favorite projects of yours? Do share.