Joomla! Annotated – February 2021

In this edition of Joomla! Annotated, you can read about the latest release of Joomla and related extensions. As usual, we’ve curated a collection of Joomla-related articles, tools, videos, and streams to share with you.

 

Official News

• Joomla 4 Beta 7 & Joomla 3.10 Alpha 5 - Joomla Team expect this to be the last beta of Joomla 4 and to have a Release Candidate available in March
• 👋 Bye Bye JoomlaCode!

Frameworks & Libraries

• 🔥 Yoyo Reactive Framework - create reactive components that are seamlessly updated without the need to write any Javascript code with Joomla! CMS.
• Dx Library - useful, fast and clean Joomla library!
• Fields Library - useful library for Joomla fields (in Russian)
• FOF -  the best Rapid Application Development framework for Joomla!™ 3 and 4
• VenoBox Helper - Provides JHtml helper for Venobox integration in Joomla
• BladeUnbound - brings the Laravel Blade templating engine to Joomla
• Astroid Framework - New update of the most Powerful Joomla Template Framework (2 fixes and 1 new improvements)

Tools

• Joomla SPA Component Creator - check online version here
• 🦁 Juumla - python cli tool developed to help with Joomla information gathering
• 🔧 JED Checker - New update to the best tool for finding common errors that will prevent you from publishing your extension on the JED (Joomla! Extensions Directory).
• JEXT-CLI - This is the cli tool for creating Joomla component using terminal.
• Constans Builder System - This tool help the Joomla community in the development of extensions.
• ComBuilder - A CLI utility for generating Joomla components
• 🔓 Bprute - Brute Force Tool for Joomla!
• DPDocker - This repository contains different docker tasks which do help for Joomla core and extension development.
• JCB - The Component Builder for Joomla is highly advanced tool that is truly able to build extremely complex components in a fraction of the time.
• PHPCompatibilityJoomla - Using PHPCompatibilityJoomla, you can analyse the codebase of a Joomla-based project for PHP cross-version compatibility.
• Joomlatools Console - simplifies the management of Joomla sites. It is designed to work on Linux and MacOS. Windows users can use it in Joomlatools Vagrant box.
• Joomlatools Pages - easy to use page generator for Joomla inspired by the ideas and concepts of flat-file CMS systems, static site generators and Headless CMS system.

Recently Updated Extensions (Free)

• GPXTrack - Joomla Custom Field for displaying a GPX-Track
• Phoca Top Menu Module - a Joomla! CMS module which displays horizontal top menu in Joomla! 4 administration.
• PWA For Joomla - Optimize any Joomla website and/or turn it into a Progressive Web Application
• TZ Portfolio+ - good portfolio developing extensions for Joomla that allows users to display, style and manage their portfolio easily.
• Responsive images for articles - A tiny content plugin that create a few different sized images on the fly and also update the markup to use HTML5 image tag srcset
• Jodit - editor for Joomla
• OSMap - the easiest way to create a Joomla sitemap.
• FF Explorer - file manager on joomla site.
• Phoca Cart - powerful shopping cart for Joomla! CMS.

New Extensions (Free)

• Sort by Field - A Joomla 3 plugin to sort the articles in a category by the value of a custom field.
• CKEditor - Free Joomla Plugin editor
• IWS.BY Google Analytics - plugin that allows you to connect the analytics counter of the Google Analytics service without any difficulties.
• JMG Article Slider - This free module shows your Joomla! articles as sliders.
• DJ-Notifications
  plugin that displays system messages from Joomla! core and 3rd party extensions in a nicer, modern way in popups instead of inline messages.

Recently Updated Templates (Free)

• JD Seattle - Free Multipurpose Business Joomla Template
• Lightning - Joomla 4 template using HiQ CSS
• Lyquix - This template is intended for advanced developers, or those looking to learn advanced template development.
• Zero - A very basic Joomla Template without any additional CSS or JS, only the basic, with special positions codes

Articles

• Sustainable web design - How we use small feet to fill big shoes
• Core Web Vitals Challenge - Real-world data is used to select which CMS is the Core Web Vitals Champion. WordPress versus Joomla, Drupal, Squarespace and Wix
• Joomla Benchmarks with PHP 8, 7.* and 5.6

Tutorials

• How to Display a Search Module in a Joomla Menu
• How to install Joomla 4
• How the Image Sitemap Works in OSMap

Videos

• Joomla 4 Beta 7 Shipped with Bootstrap 5 - Whats Your Opinion?
• Joomla Menu Separator Hack

PHP

• PHP 8.0.2, 7.4.15, 7.3.27 - The 8.0 and 7.4 updates include a variety of bug fixes, as well as a security fix for the SoapClient. The 7.3 branch received only the security fix.
• Wasmer-php – WebAssembly runtime for PHP. The extension allows you to run and use any wasm binary from PHP. For example, you can take a Rust library, compile it to Wasm, and use it on any platform from PHP just like a Composer package. The performance is also quite good. You can learn more about it in this blogpost.
• Temporalio for PHP – Despite being a work in progress, this is already a very interesting PHP-SDK for temporal.io, an event-sourcing engine that is used by Uber.
• PHP MyQL Engine – MySQL query simulator (engine) in pure PHP by vimeo. In a post about the tool, Matt Brown talks about how implementing this engine has made running tests in Vimeo twice as fast.
• Composer Patches – A plugin for Composer that allows you to apply patches to dependencies. This is useful if your changes are too specific and don’t make sense as a full-fledged pull request for a package/framework, and you don’t want to maintain a fork.
• Getting started with mutation testing
• Colliding PHP arrays – Interesting post on how you can use the fact that arrays in PHP are hash tables to perform a DoS attack.
• Benchmarks of different frameworks and CMSs with PHP 5.6, 7.*, and 8.0.