The Cloudways blog has posted a new interview in their series of talks with members of the PHP community. In their latest interview they talk with Tessa Mero of the Joomla project.

Tessa Mero is Joomla Extension Directory(JED) Assistant Manager and a contributor to different PHP open source projects. She performs as a speaker in different PHP conferences and she is also an instructor and PACE-IT Mentor at Edmonds Community College. You can also contact her and she can provide you best guidance for your career. In this interview, she talks about her initial career, developers to follow in the PHP community and also gives useful consultancy to students.

In the interview Tessa answers questions about:

• How she got started in her career as a PHP developer
• How she became involved in conferences (both in attending and speaking)
• Her experiences at Sunshine PHP
• People in the community that have influenced her
• How she sees Joomla fitting in with other similar software like WordPress and Drupal

You can read her answers to these and other questions in the full interview.

In the latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Adedayo Adeniyi talks about Joomla's "coming of age" and some of the changes that have come/are coming in the latest versions.

Over the years, there has been a healthy rivalry between the main CMSes in use on the planet: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!, and all three have hosts of die-hard fans that would pitch for their favorites over the others any day. Don’t worry, I’m not about to add to the high pile of subjective CMS comparison posts available on the web. Instead, I will briefly review all the recent changes in Joomla! that have modernized it for the present day developer – from version 3.0 onwards (currently 3.3).

She talks about some of the most recent changes including easier updating, the tool being mobile friendly out of the box and more flexible user access handling. She also mentions the improvements in "developer friendliness" and that it's become a good bit more security-conscious. Other topics mentioned include the JED (Joomla Extension Directory), smart search/tagging and improved database handling.

The PHP Town Hall podcast has released their latest episode today - Episode 22, The Great Joomla! License Battle of 2014 with guests David Stanley and Don Gilbert.

This week Ben Edmunds is joined by new guest David Stanley and recurring guest Don Gilbert to discuss the latest Joomla! framework licensing drama. Phil was too busy having a real world life to join us this week, boo! Don does a great job of articulating why switching the Joomla! Framework to an LGPL license would be best for everyone and just might cure cancer. Ben tries to play devil’s advocate but eventually can’t even maintain the ruse. David talks now and then, mostly about his new found love of the AeroPress.

You can catch this latest episode in a few different ways: either through the in-page audio player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the live recording.

The PHP Town Hall podcast has released their latest episode today - Episode 15, "The Joomla Framework and the Ongoing History of PSR-4". This time they've made both the audio and the video available (it was recorded live via Google Hangout).

The wonderfully handsome Don Gilbert joins us on our new YouTube Channel for our first live-recording of PHP Town Hall! He's been working on the Joomla Framework to get it up to scratch with modern standards ready for a Joomla CMS rewrite, much in the same way that EllisLab pulled CodeIgniter out of ExpressionEngine...except for the standards bit, because they didn't exist and PHP developers were too busy clubbing each other to death over tabs v spaces.

You can listen to this latest podcast in a few different ways - either watching the video from YouTube, downloading the mp3 directly or you can use the in-page players for either. If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

According to this new post on DevShed, there have been several targeted attacks against U.S. bank websites (DDoS), some of which involved the compromise of PHP-based applications.

Once the hackers got into the PHP-based websites, they inserted toolkits to turn them into launch pads for their distributed denial-of-service attacks. Hackers then launched the attacks on banks by connecting directly to the compromised PHP-based websites and sending them commands, or took advantage of intermediate servers, proxies or scripts to make the websites do their bidding. InformationWeek lists three attack tools used by the hackers: KamiKaze, AMOS, and the “itsokaynoproblembro” toolkit, also known as Brobot.

Several major banks have been targeted including Bank of America, JP Morgan/Chase, HSBC and Well Fargo. The main problem was out-of-date software running on the site containing known security issues the attackers could exploit to install their own software.

If a hacker can break into a PHP-based website to use it as a staging area for an attack on a different website, they can also use that website to store stolen information. InformationWeek cited the example of the Eurograbber attack campaign, revealed earlier this month. The gang involved in that campaign stole $47 million from more than 30,000 corporate and private banking customers – and used PHP-based websites into which they hacked to store stolen information.

Without a doubt, two of the most popular PHP-based projects out there are WordPress and Joomla. In this new post from SitePoint they compare the two on the basis of both their support and community (part 4 of a 5 part series).

Let’s face it, an open-source content management system without a thorough user base, support system and community is destined for failure. We are comparing two giants in the CMS game here, so we already know they must be doing many things right in these departments. In this part of our series, we’re going to be covering exactly what Joomla and WordPress have to offer when it comes to the support community.

Their comparison includes things like: WordPress.org vs Joomla.org, their respective support forums, other initiatives surrounding them and places you can find others to help you in your WordPress or Joomla work.

Michael Babker has a new post to his blog talking about how recent opinions might be the death of Joomla! and how, unless things change, it could take its toll on the project.

It's quite obvious that the state of Joomla! is not one of stability, as evidenced by recent threads on the Joomla! Bug Squad. Threads such as Help in admin menu, Thanks but no thanks, and The purpose and tone of the bug squad list all demonstrate that there is a severe rift between the leadership and the community, and within members of the community as well. Simply put, now is not the time for the Joomla! community, especially the volunteers of the Joomla! Bug Squad, to fall apart.

In his opinion, the Joomla community can't continue to function like this without causing the project to collapse under itself. Pushing away the new developers just wanting to help and putting egos ahead of good contributions only hurts things.

The Joomla! Project CAN NOT go on in this state. Chasing away the volunteers will not do anything productive. Putting your own ego before the collective Joomla! ego will not do anything productive. Not having an open mind will not do anything productive. And being overly offended by the use of a certain term by a non-English speaker certainly will not do anything productive. Change needs to happen.

On JoomlaBlogger.net there's a recent post that wants to help you understand the Joomla templating system in "five easy steps".

There are very few tutorials on how to build templates. There are two books and a handful of other resources scattered around the web. So, we set out to build the very best template class we could. Here are first five sessions of the class: Joomla templates are not rocket science. You can learn how to build and modify them. We can show you how. Interested?

They break it up into the basic parts:

• Template setup and templateDetails.xml
• Index.php
• CSS/Cascading Style Sheets
• Images
• Security

In a new post to the jfoobar blog today Wilco Jansen looks at two methods of profiling available to Joomla CMS users to help get the most performance out of your PHP applications - one onside Joomla and the other using XDebug.

In this article I want to explain the basics of profiling and profiling tools available in Joomla and PHP. In follow up articles I will explain the usage of the tools presented in this blog. I will also try to set up a performance analyses so we can see what the state of Joomla 1.6 is, but that is also for later concern. This article is based on tools that are freely available for almost all platforms.

The post is pretty quick and is more of an exposure to the two technologies than a detailed guide. Enabling the Joomla profiling is just a matter of turning on the "Debug System" command in the "Global Configuration" panel to add additional data to the logs. On the PHP side (at a lower level) you can get even more detail with XDebug including the output of a cachegrind file that can be tool through a tool for better visualization (like KCacheGrind or Webgrind).

On PHPBuilder.com today Voja Janjic has written up a "top ten" list of the most useful Joomla components you can use for your Joomla-based site.

Joomla, the PHP-based, open-source content management system (CMS), has grown in popularity thanks to its wealth of templates, modules and components, as well as its ease of installation. In this article I present the most useful Joomla components I have found in my Web development. They cover everything from e-commerce to internationalization to SEO

Components that made the list include:

• JCE (content editor)
• JoomFish (multilingual features)
• FlexBanner
• AdsManager

Each item has a brief description of what it does and a link of where to find the latest version.