Today is Joomla!'s 5th birthday.

On September 1st, 2005 the joomla.org sites were launched. Until that day, the Joomla! name was completely unknown to the world. This is a screenshot of Google's results before the launch:

Joomla 5 Years Later

Joomla is now one of the most popular software projects in the world.

Approximately 2.5% of the web runs on Joomla. It is used by organizations as large as Apple, McDonald’s and the United Nations and by millions of people for their companies, hobbies and charities.

How did we get here from such humble beginnings? You.

Joomla is 100% community-owned and operated.

Joomla has no Venture Capital firms behind it. Joomla has no parent company, no shareholders and no investors behind it. Joomla has no C.E.O., no dictator and no owner. It has you.

• You means the 20 members of the original development team that founded Joomla.
• You means the 10s of millions of people who have downloaded or installed Joomla.
• You means the 2334 developers who have written over 5500 extensions for Joomla.
• You means the site builders who use Joomla to create wonderful websites.
• You means the designers who create spectacular, cutting-edge templates.
• You means the coders who write and maintain Joomla's core.
• You means the 2348 people who have reported issues, submitted patches, and committed fixes to the core.
• You means the dedicated volunteers that keep the joomla.org family of sites running.
• You means the volunteers who contribute by answering questions in the Joomla! and regional groups and forums.
• You means the contributors to the Joomla! Community Magazine.
• You means the people who have served in the Joomla Working Groups and Teams, and on the Open Source Matters board.
• You means the Development & Community Sponsors, and those who contribute financially to the project.
• You means the Translation Teams who translate Joomla into 64+ languages.
• You means the hundreds of 1000s of companies that build successful businesses with the help of Joomla.
• You means thousands of people meeting at the 277 Registered Joomla! User Groups and Joomla! Day events around the world.

Thank you for 5 wonderful years!

Together we can keep building great software and a great community for many years to come.

Birthday News Translations

• Tillykke med fødselsdagen Joomla! (Danish)
• Bon anniversaire, Joomla! (French)
• Joomla!お誕生日おめでとう (Japanese)
• С днем рождения Joomla! (Russian)
• Srećan rođendan Joomla! (Serbian)
• Boldog születésnapot, Joomla! (Hungarian)
• Joomla! mbush 5 vjet (Albanian)
• Buon Compleanno Joomla! (Italian)
• Hartelijk Gefeliciteerd Joomla! (Dutch)
• Joomla! 5 нас хүрлээ (Mongolian)
• Joomla 5 år senare (Swedish)
• วันนี้ เป็นวันเกิดของจูมล่า ซึ่งครบรอบ 5 ขวบแล้ว (Thai)
• Hoy es el quinto aniversario de Joomla.org (Spanish)
• Khmer (Cambodia)
• Lekker verjaar Joomla! (Afrikaans)
• Hoje é o quinto aniversário de Joomla.org (Portuguese - Brazil)
• Среќен роденден Joomla! (Macedonian)
• Gratulerer med dagen Joomla! (Norwegian)
• Joomla! sai viieaastaseks (Estonian)
• Joomla! 5 Tahun Kemudian (Malay)
• Joomla! Ad günü (Azeri)

More Birthday Celebrations

• 5 anos de Joomla (Portuguese)
• عيد ميلاد جوملا! الخامس (Arabic)
• Happy 5th Birthday Joomla! Video (Made by the worldwide Joomla! community)
• 5 Years with Joomla! (InfoGraphic by Kristoffer Sandven)
• Joomla 5th birthday cards making (Video by JoomlArt)
• Happy 5th Birthday Joomla! (thanks from the Dutch community)
• Happy 5th Birthday, Joomla! (blog by Jen Kramer)
• Happy 5th Birthday Joomla! (blog by Brian Teeman)
• Happy 5th Birthday Joomla! (blog by Steve Burge)
• Happy birthday, Joomla! (blog by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos)
• 5 Fantastic years with Joomla. A nostalgic look back... (Techjoomla)
• JoomStew Podcast (with Andrew Eddie and Brian Teeman, 2 Joomla founders)

Congraulations to the Tamil Joomla Community which sucessfully held a Joomla and Linux event for more than 350 students.

The conference was at Ooris College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India on August 1st. Vellore is about 150 km west of the city of Chennai.

Sstudents and IT professionals from Chittore, Krishnagiri and Vellore districts participated in this conference. The topics were:

• What is a CMS?
• What is Joomla?
• Joomla Features
• How to install Linux
• Problems during installation
• Troubleshooting problems

McDonald's is one of the world's largest fast food companies, serving nearly 47 million customers daily.

Their website for the Arabian Peninsula uses Joomla: www.McDonaldsArabia.com. The homepage is just a splash screen but beyond that are multiple pages of Joomla graphic design excellence. The site is an excellent example of how well Joomla works for multilingual websites and also for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.

The site was built for McDonald's by MRM Worldwide who are reponsible for some of the world's largest and most prestigious advertising campaigns.

It's also worth mentioning that McDonald's are using Drupal in Australia. These two websites are a great indicator of how the world's largest corporations now utilize Open Source projects.

In December 2009, the Joomla! community was asked to nominate new Open Source Matters (OSM) board members.

OSM is entrusted with providing organizational, legal, and financial support for the Joomla! project. You can find out more about the organization at http://opensourcematters.org.

With those serious responsibilities and the recent departure of two long-serving board members, the decision has been made to expand the board once more.

We are looking for your nominations for new OSM board members.

We acknowledge that the greater worldwide Joomla! community can help us a lot in this election process, and make us aware of potential candidates we may overlook.

Nomination Information

We are looking for around seven new board members. Several will be general board members but we're also looking for three people capable of fulfilling specific positions including:

• Treasurer: responsible for ensuring that all expenditures are explained., verifing that all expenses have been properly authorized and that there is adequate documentation of expenses on file. Prepare budget and maintain financial records.
• Capital Chair: responsible for managing Joomla!’s fundraising. Tasks include working with OSM’s current partners, manging the Joomla sponsorship program and finding new partners capable of supporting the project.
• Developer Liaision: responsible for manging OSM’s connections with the Joomla! developer community.

Nomination Criteria

We are looking to recruit the very best and the brightest members in the Joomla! community. These are some of the criteria that will be used when evaluating nominations:

• Community: the nominee should have a strong track-record of successfully collaborating with, enabling others and earning the respect of the Joomla! community.
• Character: the nominee should have proven themselves a person of high character, with a history of acting honestly, fairly and openly when in leadership roles.
• Experience and Expertise: if the nominee is being proposed for a specific role, they should have strong experience and expertise in that area.
• Success: the nominee should be able to point to a history of success and leaving previous roles in a better state than when they arrived.
• Diversity: to work towards gender balance and cultural diversity, we are committed to seeking nominations from talented members of the Joomla! community who are female and / or are fluent speakers of languages or than English.

Nomination Schedule

• Nominations close: September 10 at 12:00 UTC
• Appointments announced: October 1

Nomination Form

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Joomla.org is growing!

With so many recent changes to the Joomla.org family, as well as the anticipation of Joomla! 1.6, a restructuring of the websites is due.

Joomla.org is one of the largest websites in the world (something to be very proud of). As with all large sites that are run by multiple teams, one of the biggest challenges is keeping everything consistent. We see this with corporations like Microsoft, Apple and even Dell.com, to name a few, and Joomla! is no exception.

Over the past 4 years, Joomla!'s number of sub sites has grown from a handful to nearly 20, with each site pumping out a major amount of data to the users. The current structure and layout of Joomla! is not ideal for this type of rapid growth, and it has become a bit difficult to find things. To solve this, Joomla.org will be undergoing a few changes.

Let's take a look at what changes are in the works, and why.

• Problem 1: Joomla! has approx. 20 sites. Fitting all of them into the top menu bar is virtually impossible.
• Solution 1: An attractive, easy to follow drop down navigation system will make all the sites accessible. Users will be able to navigate to various portions of the site without digging around for the links. There is a snap shot of the new drop down design in the images below.

• Problem 2: Clutter, plain and simple. Due to the rapid growth, information is scattered in places.
• Solution 2: The restructured site is clean, organized, and polished. (See image below.)

• Problem 3: Consistency. This is often hard to control on an everyday site, let alone one with rapid growth.
• Solution 3: Each individual site will be rolled with the new template, providing consistency throughout. (Someday I will figure out that Wiki... ;-)  )

• Problem 4: Content Management.
• Solution 4: While we are upgrading the templates for the site, we will make enhancements to the current content structure, making it easier for you to navigate and find things without using Google.

 

 

 

 

 

We have set out to keep the new template just as clean as the old one, while allowing for additional growth. The new design is streamlined, simple and easy to navigate.

 

We'd like your help as we move forward with the new design.

 

Your input is valuable. What we do impacts you, the people who visit and contribute to the Joomla! sites every day. If you have suggestions based on the images above, we are open to hearing about them. Please use the following form to submit suggestions: https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/community.joomla.org/viewform?formkey=dEhmNWFscnl0T2Vkd1laSXhYTk53N0E6MQ.

We will iron out all the kinks over the next few weeks, then we will roll out the updates. Joomla.org will be updated first, then we will move on to the sub sites. We honestly can't wait to launch the site! As much as we'd like to do it today, there are still some important things to consider...mainly, your input.

Keep your eyes peeled for these major updates to Joomla.org.

Gorillaz is a musical project created in 1998 by Damon Albarn of alternative rock band Blur. They've sold enormous numbers of records and also have won a large number of awards.

They're now nominated for another award - Resdesign of the Year. Gorillaz.com was rebuilt in Joomla earlier this year and is nominated for the prestigious .net Awards. How much of an honor is it to be nominated? They're listed alongside ars technica, BBC News, CNN, istockphoto, Facebook, Flickr, Gowalla, MSNBC, YouTube. To vote: visit the .net Awards site and click tab number 14.

New Site

Old Site (via Archive.org, October 2009)

I've had the privilege of working with an organization based in Ethiopia this week. They wanted some information about how widely used Open Source is and whether it would be a good choice. So I started digging and found out that practically every Ethiopian university and the vast majority of the country's government agences all run Joomla. There's a list below that took me an hour to find, just looking for offiicial sites.

This is a tribute to the hard work of all involved in Joomla. To take just one example, the people on our translation teams have made it possible for website builders to suceed even with languages like Amharic - the ancient language of Ethiopia. Our community has had a remarkable effect on the web in a country of 80 million people.

A Joomla 5th Birthday Challenge for You

The thing is, there are many more countries like Ethiopia out there. Some such as Cape Verde and Mongolia have switched their whole government to Joomla. So, we have a Joomla 5th Birthday Challenge for you:

• Create a list of notable Joomla sites in your country. Just look around where you live and find the Joomla sites.
• Email the list to steve.burge@opensourcematters.org before September 1st.
• We'll publish it here on joomla.org during Joomla's 5th Birthday.

Pizza Hut is the world’s leading pizza company with over 12,000 stores in 90 countries.

They run Joomla for their main website in France: http://www.PizzaHut.fr:

Earlier this year we ran a series of interview on developers of very high-profile Joomla websites. Now in a new series we're talking with developers of normal business websites and interesting aspects of their work.

This week we're talking with Mark Rosser of AmorWebDesign.com, based in England and Spain, about building multi-lingual websites with Joomla.

Why did you choose to focus on Joomla?

We had been monitoring the evolution of content management systems for some time. We believed that they were destined to become the preferred environment for web developers and clients alike. Being peripatetic we wanted to focus on international clients and therefore required an environment that allowed us to create multi-lingual sites with ease.

Working from different locations throughout the UK and Europe we are able to have members of our team working simultaneously on a project whilst providing a seamless build to our clients. Moreover, with in excess of 5000 extensions, Joomla enables us to offer our clients an enormous amount of features specific to their individual requirements. This has resulted in us, so far, being able to fulfil every request made by our clients.

Who said becoming a Registered JUG was easy? WE DID!

New, Easier Application Process for Joomla User Groups

The JUG team is proud to present a new and improved system for JUG applications.  After a short interim period using a temporary relief system,  the entire process was restructured from the ground up to provide a more streamlined approach to all areas of the process. 

The requirements and guidelines have been changed as well to allow more Registered JUGs worldwide.  If you'd like to register a JUG, please visit the FAQ on how to get started.  

Many JUG applications that were previously rejected or held up, have now been approved and listed in the new directory.  Please check your location to ensure your JUG is included.  If not, please reapply through our new application process.

New Directory and Map For All Joomla User Groups

We've created directory and map for all Joomla User Groups. By using Moset's Tree and Moxie Maps the directory listings are now plotted on a worldwide map which allows for easy and powerful searches. Click here to see the new map and directory.

Each approved JUG has a login and is now able to login to their listing and make changes.  Submitted changes will go into the queue and will be approved in a timely manner.  We ask that all JUG Owners please login and update your details as soon as possible.

New Team Members

The JUG team has also grown and now includes Wlima Howell, Cristina Solana, Himanshu Nagpal, Roger Perren as well as Sandra Warren and Javier Gomez.

Your Feedback is Welcome

Thank you for your patience through this process!  We invite you to submit feedback to this new process and system at the People.Joomla.Org group and if you need assistance please email us at jugs@community.joomla.org

Joomla 1.6 beta versions are out!

I, along with the rest of the Joomla! developer community, have been downloading and installing the new release and playing around with all the goodies.

The community is gearing up and squashing all those little annoying bugs and working on the help screens (Note: Documentation is extremely important! I was on the doc team for the 1.5 release and it's very rewarding - Get involved!).

Now that Joomla 1.6 Beta has arrived, it's time to take a look under the hood of the new Template Manager and examine the new features it has to offer.

I figured the best way to look at the differences between Joomla 1.6 Beta and Joomla 1.5 would be to compare those differences for you. So, let's get started!

[Template Manager] Joomla 1.5 vs Joomla 1.6 Beta Joomla 1.5 Template Admin Joomla 1.6 Beta Template Admin

So the biggest differences you'll see here is that Joomla 1.5 gives you two sub options: Site Templates and Admin Templates. Joomla 1.6 Beta is drastically different. Instead of site templates an admin templates, instead you'll find Styles, and Templates. This highlights a huge functional change in the way templates will operate in Joomla 1.6 in terms of customization. Joomla 1.6 handles front end vs backend handling by adding a location parameter.

At the J and Beyond 2010 conference in Weisbaden, DE, I had the pleasure to meet and chat with Aarti Mahajan, a graduate student in Innovation & Entrepreneurship Management Department at the Ghent University in Belgium.

Aarti’s doctoral research is aimed at revealing the entrepreneurship and revenue generation opportunities within the Joomla! ecosystem.

To obtain the appropriate data for her research, Aarti has prepared two surveys aimed at Joomla! extension developers and service providers. Each survey will take approximately 30 minutes to complete. The results of the research will strictly be used for academic purposes and will be shared with the respondents.

With the help of the responses, the companies will be compared across various dimensions and best practices leading to success of these firms will be identified.

As an academic myself, I find this research very exciting. To my knowledge, this will be the first formal economic study of Joomla! and I am very interested to see the results. Since Joomla! is all about community, I strongly encourage all developers and service providers in the Joomlasphere community to participate.

The founders of companies that develop extensions and/or templates for Joomla! are invited to participate in the survey for PRODUCT DEVELOPERS which is available at the following URL:

http://ugent.limequery.com/79385/lang-en

The founders of companies that provide services (web design, consulting, training, SEO, etc.) for Joomla! are invited to participate in the survey for SERVICE PROVIDERS which is available at the following URL:

http://ugent.limequery.com/55822/lang-en

For more background on Aarti’s research and to discuss any issues and ask questions, please visit the following thread on the Joomla! forums:

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=262&t=539207

Disclaimer: Joomla!™ is a registered trademark of Open Source Matters. The research described above is not affiliated to Joomla!, Open Source Matters or any of its subsidiaries.

The Women's Refugee Commission is a non-governmental organization based in New York City. It advocates for laws and programs to improve the lives and protect the rights of women, children and young people.

Today they're taking part in International Youth Day which is on August 12 each year. The theme for today's event is Dialogue and Mutual Understanding. Today is also the start of the International Year of Youth, held for the first time since 1985. Find out more at the WRC website.

While you're there, you might notice that WomensRefugeeCommission.org is a very high quality Joomla website.

The Production Leadership Team (PLT) is the group of people that is responsible for keeping the machinery that produces the Joomla software maintained and in good working order.  The PLT aims to meet in person once or twice a year.  The last development related summit was held in Australia in January of 2009 and this meeting was pivotal for bringing in necessary changes to the organisational and communication structure of the Joomla production system, lowering the barriers to entry for contribution significantly.

The next PLT Summit will be held around the Joomla Day West in San Jose in October this year.  Prime focus will be given to establishing the policy and process we need to revise in order to make Joomla 1.7, and all future versions, happen in a more timely and efficient manner, and allow for innovation to be incorporated at a pace that keeps up with the dynamic flow of the part of the internet in which we reside. To help us plan for this summit, we'd like your suggestions for what you think might be important for us to talk about.  We only have two or three days together so we can't cover everything, but we'd like to know what's on your mind all the same whether you are a user, a developer, a designer or a site administrator.  If you have a suggestion, please post them using this form.

Finally, we must thanks the sponsors for this event which have offset the major costs that would otherwise have been bourn by PLT members personally.  Thanks go to eBay, Microsoft and Kontent Design for allowing us to make this event possible.

In an effort to maintain the Board's effectiveness during its search for a new Treasurer, the Board of Open Source Matters, Inc. (OSM), on the 10th of August 2010, appointed Steve Burge as Acting Treasurer of the organization, for a period ending no later than November 1, 2010 or until a new Treasurer has been elected, appointed or qualified, whichever comes first.

The Acting Treasurer shall have all the abilities and privileges of the Treasurer, but is only expected to provide his services in a limited role during this interim period.

The OSM board wishes to express thanks to Steve for assisting in this important role.

Over the last few weeks we've been working hard to update and improve Joomla's presence on social networking sites. Here's an update:

Facebook

http://facebook.com/joomla

• We talked with Facebook and were able to move from our old URL which was too hard to remember: facebook.com/joomla.official.page. Our official Joomla account is now at http://facebook.com/joomla. Thanks to Chris Torneheim from the Swedish Joomla group for his help.
• We tidied up the page and made it much more visually appealing.
• We've a new guarantee: if you follow us on Facebook, you will not miss any important Joomla news. It will be posted there as well.

Twitter

http://twitter.com/joomla

• We have a new URL shortner: http://joom.la. This means that all Joomla.org links will be easily recognizable, for example: http://joom.la/JDItaly10 leads to an article on Joomla Day Italy. If you see a http://joom.la link you can be sure that it is an official link that will lead you to http://joomla.org. Thanks to Marcel Böttcher for his help.
  
• We had been using auto-tweet features that sometimes resulted in duplicate or mistaken posts. We've cleaned that up to ensure that all tweets are unique and useful.
• We've a new guarantee: if you follow us on Twitter, you will not miss any important Joomla news. It will be posted there as well.

Looking for Your Help: New Team Members

Over the next few week's we'll be recruiting team members to help us run Joomla's off-site social networking. We'll ask for help not only with Facebook and Twitter but with YouTube, Flickr and other Joomla accounts. Stay tuned for more details shortly.

Looking for Your Help: A Design Competition for Joomla on Twitter and YouTube

You many have noticed that the Joomla accounts on Twitter and YouTube still look a little plain.

We'd like to make them look a lot more professional, so we're looking for holiding a design competition. Click here for more information.

 

My first article on ACL covered one tiny aspect of this system: determining who can see which content once they've logged into the front end of the website.

This article covers "The Full ACL": who gets to create, edit, delete, change the state, manage, administer, and log into the website. Yes, that's basically any permission except for read!

Why would you want to configure this aspect of ACL? You might use The Full ACL in the following situations:

• You have users who should be able to create and edit content for the website, but they can't necessarily publish content. What's more, you have two or more groups of these users who need to create and edit content belonging to different areas of the website.
• You would like a user to be able to edit specific modules, but leave other modules untouched.
• You would like a user to be able to log into the back end of the website, access controls for a single component, and touch nothing else.

Sound exciting? Yes,the controls that The Full ACL brings us for maintaining our Joomla websites are very exciting. But perhaps you feel a headache starting somewhere? That's completely normal. ACL is NOT straightforward or simple to configure. Use The Full ACL with caution. It's possible to completely lock yourself out of your website if you're not careful.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should!

Review

As a refresher, let's define our terms for The Full ACL as it pertains to this article:

User

This is the easiest one to understand — that's you, or someone else visiting the website. A user does not have to have an account to be considered a user of the website. That user would still be considered a public user. Individual users may be assigned to one or several groups. You cannot assign core permissions directly to users; these are assigned to the group.

Core Permissions

Core permissions are assigned to the group, not to individual users. (If you want specific core permissions for a single user, you would need to create a group for that single user.)

Core permissions include:

• Site login: the ability to log into the front of the website.
• Admin login: the ability to log into the back end of the website.
• Admin: administrative (root) privileges, such as changing Global Configuration, as well as assigning permissions.
• Manage: ability to change settings on extensions, including templates.
• Create: ability to create new content.
• Delete: ability to delete (trash) content.
• Edit: ability to edit existing content which is not necessarily your own.
• Edit state: ability to change state between published, unpublished, trash.

Group

A group is a group of users who share the same permissions. Using the Joomla 1.5 groups as an example, the publisher group has the right to log into the front of the website, create new articles, edit any articles on the site, and publish or unpublish articles. Anyone in the publisher group has the same permissions to do these same things.

Unlike Joomla 1.5, however, a user may be assigned to multiple groups. A user may be in the publisher group as well as the administrator group, for example.

You can create your own groups and assign them their own set of core permissions. Core permissions are inherited between groups.

A group might be created for two different reasons. One would be to view content on the front end of the website (covered in a previous article). The other would be to specify what content can be created, edited, deleted, published or unpublished, managed, or administered by that group, which this article covers.

By visiting the website, a site visitor is considered a user belonging to the public group.

The public group and the registered group may not be deleted, but all other groups may be deleted. (However, I'd recommend you keep all groups, because they give you a good model of how permissions inheritance works.)

The Default Groups

By default, Joomla 1.6 comes configured with the same groups as appear in Joomla 1.5. The groups and their core permissions are as follows (consider singing along to "The 12 Days of Christmas" while reading):

• Public: Public can see the content on the front end of the website that is not hidden behind a login. They have no core permissions.
• Registered: Registered users can log into the front end of the website only. Registered users are children of the Public group. They are assigned the Site Login permission.
• Author: Authors can create their own content via the Create permission. Authors are children of the Registered group. They inherit the Site Login permission from Registered users.
• Editor: Editors can edit any content on the site via the Edit permission. Editors are children of the Author group. They also inherit the Create permission from Authors and the Site Login permission from Registered users.
• Publisher: Publishers may publish, unpublish, or trash content via the Edit State permission. Publishers are children of the Editor group. They also inherit the Edit permission from Editors, the Create permission from Authors, and the Site Login permission from Registered users.
• Manager: Managers may delete content via the Delete permission and log into the back end of the website via the Admin Login permission. Managers are children of the Public group, so all permissions previously assigned to Registered, Author, Editor, and Publisher groups do not apply to Managers. They must all be reassigned individually.
• Administrator: Administrators are able to edit and configure extensions (this now includes templates!) via the Manage permission. Administrators are children of the Manager group, so they inherit the Site Login, Create, Edit, Edit State, Delete, and Admin Login permissions from them.
• Super Users: Super Users (formerly Super Administrators) are able to change Global Configuration as well as other abilities via the Admin permission. Super Users are children of the Administrator group. They inherit the Manage permission from Administrators and the Site Login, Create, Edit, Edit State, Delete, and Admin Login permissions from Managers.

The default groups and their permissions are represented in the Global Configuration (under Site - Global Configuration - Permissions).

Understanding Core Permissions in Global Configuration

Each one of the dropdowns shown here has three options: Allow, Deny, and ... I've shown the Create permission from the Publisher group above, but all dropdowns are the same.

• Allow means something is explicitly allowed or permitted for a specific group.
• Deny means something is explicitly denied or not permitted for a specific group.
• ... means the permission is not set. If a permission is available from lower level groups (the groups listed above it in the table), it will inherit that permission. If there are no settings to inherit, this permission is denied.

Read across each row to see the permissions set specifically for a given group. For the Public group, there are no core permissions set. As you might expect, Public users are not allowed to log into the front end of the website, among other permissions. They are not explicitly denied from doing this, however — they are denied because there is no permission explicitly set.

For the Registered group, the Site Login permission is allowed. Everything else is not set. Registered is a child of Public, so it does not inherit any core permissions.

For the Author group, the Create permission is allowed. Author is a child of registered, so it inherits the Site Login permission from Registered. Remember that ... means to inherit from a lower level group (Registered), or deny if there is nothing to inherit.

Follow the examples for Editor and Publisher. Editors are allowed to edit plus inherit Create and Site Login from lower groups. Publishers are allowed to Edit State plus inherit Create, Edit, and Site Login from lower groups.

Note the Manager has several permissions assigned: Site Login, Admin Login, Create, Delete, Edit, and Edit State. Note too that Manager is a child of Public. Because Manager inherits no core permissions from Public, it must have those permissions set in this screen. Administrators add the Manage permission, while Super Users add the Admin permission.

Special note: Historically, Authors have been able to create content as well as edit their own content (but not all content as with the Edit permission). This is not possible in Joomla 1.6 Beta 6, but it has been flagged as a bug. It seems that the Create permission will also allow editing of the user's own content once it is fixed.

All About Deny

You might be tempted to set all of these dropdowns to specifically say Allow or Deny so it's easier to read.

However, I would strongly encourage you NOT to do that.

If Deny is set in the permissions, even if you set an Allow for a higher level user group, the lower level Deny would be inherited and would override the Allow.

For example, if you set the Public group dropdowns to Deny for all, there's no point in having any higher level groups! Everyone would be denied from doing anything on the website forever. That would also mean you're locked out of the website as a Super User. (Locked out of your site? Read below to find out how to get back in.)

I Want Different People To Edit Different Content On My Site

For our school site, we'd like to have two teachers, Ms. Jones (who teaches history) and Mr. Smith (who teaches art) to be able to make additions and changes to the website.

These teachers should be able to create, edit, delete, and publish content on the website. They should be able to do this from the front end or the back end of the website. However, they should be restricted to completing these tasks for their class only. They should not be able to touch anything elsewhere in the website.

For the sake of simplicity, we'll assume that all content is readable by the public on the front end of the website. This does not have to be the case, though. We could set this up such that students in each class are able to read the content, but not the general public. To learn how to do that, see the first article on ACL.

Our approach will be as follows:

1. Create our groups, called "History Department Group" and "Art Department Group". They will be children of the Publisher group, which has most of the permissions they require. (Remember that a user must be in a group as permissions are assigned to groups and not to users. Even if you have only one person, they must still be assigned to a group.)
2. Assign core permissions to our group. In this case, we're assigning the Delete permission, which the Publisher group does not have.
3. Create our users and assign them to groups. I'll create a user called "Ms. Jones", who is in the History Department Group, and another called "Mr. Smith", who is in the Art Department Group.
4. Create a category and assign permissions for Ms. Jones called "History Category" and a category for Mr. Smith called "Art Category".
5. Create articles for the History Category and Art Category.
6. Create a category list layout for the History Category and another for the Art Category. These will be visible by the public on the front end of the website, but only editable by the users in the History Department Group and the Art Department Group.
7. Test our logins and see if they work correctly.

1. Create Our Groups

• Go to Users - Add New Group.
• Enter History Department Group as the Group Title.
• Choose Publisher as Group Parent.
• Click Save & New.
• Enter Art Department Group as the Group Title.
• Choose Publisher as the Group Parent.
• Click Save & Close. You now have two new groups.

2. Assign core permissions to our groups.

In this case, we're assigning the Delete and Admin Login permissions, which the Publisher group does not have.

• Go to Site - Global Configuration - Permissions
• Set the Delete permissions for the Art Department Group and History Department Group to Allow. Remember that they will inherit Create, Edit, Edit State, and Site Login permissions from the Publisher group and its parents.
• Click Save & Close.

3. Create our users and assign them to groups.

I'll create a user called "Ms. Jones" and another called "Mr. Smith" for our example.

• Go to Users - Add New User
• Enter Ms. Jones' name, login name, and email, and assign her to the History Department Group.
• Click Save & New, and repeat this process for Mr. Smith, assigning him to the Art Department Group.
• Click Save & Close.

4. Create a category and set permissions

We'll create two categories, one for the History Department Group called "History Category" and a category for the Art Department Group called "Art Category".

• Go to Content - Category Manager
• Click New
• Enter the category information as follows:
  • Title: History Category
  • Parent: No Parent
  • State: Published
• Click Save & New, and repeat:
  • Title: Art Category
  • Parent: No Parent
  • State: Published
• Click Save & Close.

Next, under Category Access Rules on the right side of the screen, check the summary of options.

This is a summary of the create, delete, edit, and edit state permissions for this specific category (in this case, History).

Note that the Art Department Group and History Department Group have the same permissions as the Publisher group, except for Delete, which was added to these groups in step 2, in the Global Configuration.

Now, we'd like to set this so that the History Department Group is able to create, delete, edit, and edit state for the History Category, but the Art Department Group is denied from doing any of these actions.

Clicking through the tabs on top, the screens are set up in the following way:

Create:

Delete:

Edit:

Edit State:

Final Summary:

To draw some conclusions from this:

• Art Department Group may not change anything in the History Category.
• History Department Group has full control: create, edit, delete, edit state
• A standard Publisher is also able to create, edit, and edit state in the History category.
• If you wanted to exclude Publishers from create, edit, and edit state, you should create the History Department Group as a child of Public, rather than a child of Publisher. This could give them the ability to be the only group who could create, edit, edit state, and delete content within the History Category.

Repeat the same process with the Art Department Group and the Art Category. The end result should be this:

Note that for every other category on this website, the Art Deparment Group and the History Department Group should not be able to make any changes to the content. That means for any remaining categories on the website, you'll need to configure them like this:

When ACL is working correctly (which it is not yet in Joomla 1.6 beta 6), the permissions on the category should cascade to the article. By setting permissions at the category level, the users creating articles do not need to set permissions for each individual article. That's pretty important to your maintenance plan, because understanding how to set the permissions correctly can be difficult!

5. Create articles for the History Category and the Art Category.

We'll create two articles for each category as an example, but you may create more if you wish. Be sure to set the category for each article correctly (to either the History Category or the Art Category) and make sure the articles are published.

6. Create menu items for the History Category and the Art Category.

All articles will be visible by the public on the front end of the website, but they only editable by the History Deparment Group and the Art Department Group. (If you want to make them visible to select audiences, this is where access control levels come in. They were covered in a previous article.)

I am creating two category list layouts, one for the History Category and one for the Art Category.

7. Test our logins

I've logged into the site as Ms Jones. I've gone to an art article, page, but I have no edit icon:

But if I go to a history article, I can edit that.

Be aware that in setting up this example, you may encounter two bugs along the way.

• No matter how you're logged in, you can create a new article in any category you choose. They all show up in the category dropdown menu. However, once you've created the article, you won't be able to edit it.
  EXAMPLE: Log in as Ms. Jones, create an article for the Art Department Category. Save, publish — it shows up in the category list layout. However, you will not be able to edit the article.
• In editing an article in Firefox 3.6.8 on PC, I was unable to click the Save button and have it work. Save worked for creating an article but not editing it.

I'm Locked Out Of My Site

It's possible to lock anyout out of the back end of the website — including Super Users with Admin permissions — by setting the Site Admin permission to Deny. That could happen specifically at the Super User group or at the Manager or Administrator group level. If Manager or Administrator is set to Deny, the Super User would inherit Deny from these groups, even if the Super User group is set to Allow.

Fortunately, there is a "back door" that will let you log into your website again. You must have access to the files on the web server in order to make the back door work. You can either use FTP to access the files, or you can go through your site's control panel to a file manager and edit the files on the server.

However you access your files, you'll need to edit the configuration.php file, located in the root of your website. You will need to know the Super User username or their ID. Let's assume that the Super User username is johnsmith for this example. (For security reasons, it's strongly recommended that you use something other than admin as a username for your Joomla site.)

Add this line of code to the bottom of configuration.php:

public $root_user="johnsmith";

If you would prefer, you could also use the ID of the user (although it's less likely you'd know this without looking up the number in the database):

public $root_user="42";

 

Thank you to Brian Teeman, for providing the title, helping to revise and edit the article, and for testing the example to make sure it works.

In May, Brad Baker started this blog series with a roundup of informative reports submitted from each CWG team on the Community Workgroup Google Group. 

Today we continue the series with a round up the team reports from July and I also encourage you to check out the June reports, if you have not already had the chance to do so.

Carry on reading for some incredible news and stats from the hard working teams within the CWG.

Some times we all have enough of networking online and want to meet in person. Even website enthusisats want the chance to sit in the same room, talk, laugh, share successes, share frustrations and discuss Joomla.

Here's a list of the Joomla User Groups meeting around the world in just the few days. We've also included upcoming Joomla Days.

If your group is meeting, let us know in the comments section and we'll add it to the list. Oh, and if you don't have your Joomla User Group event listed on http://people.joomla.org, what are you waiting for?

15 Minute Guide to Access Levels in ACL

If you’ve heard anything about Joomla 1.6, chances are you’ve heard about two exciting new features more than others: nested categories, and something called ACL.

ACL stands for access control levels. It refers to who has permission to do what on the website, including read, create, edit, delete, or log in, among other permissions.

Many think of ACL as relating to the front end of a website only. For example, when I log into the website, what articles do I have available to me? And if someone else logs into the site, do they see the same articles, or do they see different ones?

However, ACL also relates to who has rights to create, edit, and delete content; who can publish and unpublish content; who can log into the front end or back end of the website; and who can make changes to which components and modules.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should! ACL is complex, and it takes some time to understand exactly how it works. For many sites, perhaps even most sites, you might not need anything beyond the default Joomla configuration. However, if you're building a larger site, it could come in handy.