Thanks for using Joomla and Joomlashack. Every month we post a round-up of news from around the Joomla community.

We've posted all of these updates, plus a lot more in the Joomlashack Facebook group, so join if you want daily Joomla updates. We have over 1,200 members now!

OSpam-a-Not Pro is Now Available There's now a Pro version available for the OSpam-a-not plugin. OSpam-a-not is the easiest way to protect your Joomla site from spam bots filling out your forms. This is our 25th Pro extension.

More about OSpam-a-Not Pro

Joomla 5 Alpha 1 is Available Joomla 5.0 is due to be released on or about the 17th of October. This first release is for developers to test their extensions and report any issues well before the final release. The Joomla team promise that this will be an upgrade, and it is not a migration.

More about the release of Joomla 5 Alpha

You Can Help Design the Joomla Websites This blog post features a challenge, but it's also a really interesting insight into some of the difficulties of running a big, sprawling open source project. Philip Walton shows the different designs for each Joomla site, both now and in the past. He also explains that they will be creating a unified design for all the sites to launch with Joomla 5. They want your help to create the best possible new design.

More about the Joomla 5 design challenge

Books About Joomla 4 Anja de Crom has an overview of all the books available on Joomla 4. There are books for beginners, extension developers, and template designers. She also lists books in English, French, and German.

Read more about Joomla 4 books

Video: Filter by Article Content From Tim Davis: "Filtering by content may not be one of the dropdown options in the Joomla Article Manager (yet), but that doesn't mean you can't filter by content in the Joomla Article Manager!"

See Tim's video on filtering by content

Video: A Great Tool to Migrate Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 Rod Martin says: "With the 'end of life' for Joomla 3 rapidly approaching, Joomla site builders are looking for easy ways to migrate their sites to Joomla 4. In this video, we highlight a great extension called MigrateMe4 that will help you do just that."

Watch Rod's video on MigrateMe4

Using ChatGPT in Joomla Yannck Gaultier is famous in the Joomla community for his SEO extensions. He has just launched a new extension that integrates ChatGPT into Joomla. You can use AI to "create a new article or product description, a translation, spell/check, title, description, tweet, or Facebook post in seconds." There's also a new video available of Yannick speaking on this topic.

Watch Tim's video on AI

Videos: Kevin Olson on Joomla 4 Template Development Kevin has published a four-part beginner series on developing site templates for Joomla 4. In this first video, he discuss the software and skills you'll need to get started. Knowledge of HTML and CSS is required.

Watch the first of Kevin's template series

Recommended Video Channel: Robbie Jackson Does it feel like a lot of the best new content is going on YouTube? Most of this month's newsletter is Joomla videos. I strongly recommend Robbie's channel on Joomla development. In May, he published guides on parsing URLs in Joomla and how to generate friendly URLs in Joomla.

Check out Robbie's channel

Congrats to YooTheme on Version 4 YooTheme have been going for 15 years now and have always done great work. We want to congratulate them on their big new release of YooTheme Pro 4.

Read the introduction to YooTheme Pro 4

Playing with the Joomla Web Services (API) - Part 3 Marc Dechèvre continues to write a lot of tutorials around using the Joomla API. He's just published Part 3 in a series on the Joomla Magazine. He shows you how to import articles to Joomla directly from a Google Sheet. There's also a new video available of Marc speaking on this topic.

See Part 3 of Marc's tutorial

JoomlaDay France is June 16 and 17 The big Joomla event in the Netherlands will be held this month in Metz: "JoomlaDay France is an annual event that brings together all French-speaking users of Joomla and beyond. Like the Joomla Community, it brings together professionals, developers, web designers, beginners, experts, students, enthusiasts, and skeptics."

Sign up for Joomla Day France