With the downturn in interest in Joomla now so obvious that you would have to have been deaf and blind to the news, the market has become confined to Europe and there are no signs that people in Australia are looking at Joomla as a platform to build websites, it’s become too much of a burden for third-party developers to build new extensions or to support those they have for the few customers who may want them.  Accordingly I am beginning to dismantle the support forum that is available on this website and turn my interests in a different direction.

The support forum was built years ago using Kunena.  Kunena is a very good forum extension for Joomla.  Kunena was one of the main reasons I became interested in Joomla.  However, over time, people seem to have lost interest in text-based support forums as a way to obtain help.  No-one has submitted a support question (for over a year) about any of the products I offer.  That’s not a bad record; it means that people are purchasing my extensions and they’re able to use them by reading the documentation I’ve written.  I kept the forum going just in case but it’s now time to close it down.

This does not mean that I’m writing-off this website or abandoning my followers.  It only means that I will be removing the forum part of the website and modifying my extensions accordingly to remove references to it.

The cost in using Joomla

I have been a keen follower of the Joomla project since 2008 when I created my first Joomla website.  In that time I have maintained my interest in using Joomla—I created more than a dozen extensions, written documentation, contributed substantially to various online forums—as well as kept this website up to date.  All of this comes at a cost in terms of money, time and emotional drain.  It’s not easy maintaining the enthusiasm I once had for Joomla.

When the Joomla project began twenty years ago, times were different back then.  The Joomla community was different.  The community of enthusiasts was strong and supportive; the community welcomed a diversity of different opinions.  This has changed.  Joomla continues to be popular—if we can describe it in such terms—in western and central EuropeMainly The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France a few other countries (including Russia … but we know little about what happens there) and, to some extent, in the United States.

The world has changed and the way people build websites today has also changed.  We do not see the same enthusiasm for user-created websites.  People look towards turnkey systems instead of trying to design, build and host their own websites.  It isn’t cheap.  If someone asked me how much it would cost to design, build and host a website, I would say $1,500 (as a minimum).

The financial cost

I have no idea how much money I have spent hosting this website.  I have purchased books, travelled to attend conferences and meetings, as well as purchased domain names and the web hosting space.  Several thousands of dollars and I have made almost nothing from selling what I can sell.  It is not worth the expense to maintain a website in the unlikely event that I may make a little bit of pocket money.  It’s just a hobby … but it’s an expensive one.

I do not know how many computers I have bought (or thrown away), or books and other bits and pieces (donated to charities).  I still have a couple of computers:  one for writing, one for chatting and one for experimentation.  They take time and money to maintain them:  replacing dead hardware, updating software, etc.  There are only so many hours in the day and what little money is in the bank to buy new gear or keep the old gear running for as long as possible.

I cannot afford to buy more equipment or additional website hosting space to run the latest version of Joomla:  J! 6.0.  So, I had a decision to make and I decided that J! 6 (and beyond) is out of my reach.  Joomla just costs too much money for me to continue with it.

The personal cost

I could not begin to estimate the hundreds of thousands of hours I’ve spent researching information, the millions of words I’ve written explaining what I’ve discovered, the thousands of hours helping people—helping them for nothing more than the time we spend together answering their myriad questions—or the effort I’ve put into understanding as much as I can learn about the Joomla project.

I do not regret the time I’ve spent but I cannot continue to provide a question-and-answer forum here for people.  Joomla just costs too my time to persevere and not learn anything new or useful.

The emotional cost

This is perhaps the biggest cost of all.  For all the efforts I’ve made, the offers to join several Joomla teams, my regular attendance on Mattermost (and a few other places), my reward has been a huge big slap in the face and a torrent of verbal abuse.  I’m a fairly resilient person and, I believe, someone who speaks the truth.  However, the few—maybe a couple of dozen—people who churn out Joomla propaganda are not interested in the truth.

The Joomla CMS product is good.  It is not as good as some other software we could name and it's better than other software we could mention.  But it’s hard to use; it’s expensive to use; it takes time—weeks or more—to understand how to use it.  The documentation is poorly organised.  The “official” self-help forum is not helpful; the search feature is almost impossible to use and the references to documentation are completely useless.  Although it’s “relatively” straightforward to deploy a “vanilla-flavoured” Joomla website on a hosting platform, it depends on your overall knowledge of webcraft.  Where to host the site?  How to purchase the domain name?  How to tweak the site to suit your specific purposes.  How to get the site indexed on Google?  Those kinds of questions.

And then, where do you go, whom do you contact, when you have a problem or a question?  Do you use The Joomla Forum™?

To give you an idea of The Joomla Forum™ experience, if you are not using the latest version of Joomla you will be told that you’re outdated and your website will die because you are not using the latest version of Joomla.  That is not very comforting to people who have a simple question, is it?  Be careful when you use The Joomla Forum™ because, if you write the wrong thing you will probably find yourself banned from it.  There are other more welcoming forums where people can obtain help, anyway, e.g. Joomla StackExchange and I recommend it.

My Joomla experience has been unrelentingly brutal.  It is not a happy “vibrant” community.

The future of the “Joomla ecosystem”

You might hear the term “Joomla ecosystem” mentioned in magazine articles or in conversation.  It refers to the third-party add-ons—the extensions built by people who are not “core developers”—some of which are free and some that can be purchased for small amount of money.  At one time, there were over 10,000 extensions advertised on the Joomla Extensions Directory but today there are less than half that number (4,811 as I write this).  This “ ecosystem” is the life blood that makes Joomla more appealing to website developers for, without it, Joomla is just another CMS.

There are fewer people creating extensions.  Those who have been in the business for many years are finding, like me, that the cost of supporting their products is too high; they are also tired of seeing their extensions taken for granted, sometimes the cause of complaints from people struggling to migrate from one major version of Joomla to another, no longer able to be maintained.  Over the past twelve months I have witnessed several long-time extension developers exit the business.  I know that in the fullness of time I, too, will join them and leave.

Nothing lasts forever, of course.  However, for the Joomla project to prosper, this ecosystem must be nurtured.  Third-party developers are almost at the bottom of the food chain.  More and more of us are tired of the continual changes to the Joomla CMS that make things increasingly difficult to adapt.  It’s a bit like Darwin’s theory of evolution; survival of the fittest; adapt or die.

Well, I am one of those third-party extension developers and I, too, cannot maintain the few extensions I have written.  Even a simple change—such as changing one character in a module or plugin—takes over an hour.  You not only have to change one character (and test everything, of course) you also have to write the release notes, use the JED Checker system, modify the XML with a new version number, re-package the PHP, CSS, XML and whatever else is involved, update the JED listing and then deploy the new version.  And you—the author—have to do all the marketing yourself because no-one else will do it for you; your customers won’t say how good or bad your products are; you’re totally on your own.  Furthermore, don’t expect any acknowledgement or appreciation for your work.  The Joomla! community doesn’t care what happens to you.

Therefore, in order to modify the few extensions that I have written, these changes happen when I have the time to do them.  It is likely that it will take me a week to modify each of my extensions to remove the mention of the support forum.

Joomla’s toxic culture

Much has been said and written about a pervasive “toxic culture” presence in the Joomla communitySee
• The Fall of Joomla
• My office has mixed feelings about Joomla
• Joomla, we have a problem
• Honest communication
• How hard work and a good attitude can make all the difference but nothing at all has been achieved to address the causes or the persistence of that culture within the community.

It’s almost impossible for newcomers to the Joomla community to find a safe space where they can share their opinions about the way that the product is developed.  In order to become a member of Open Source Matters, Inc. [OSM]—the organisation that provides the legal and financial support for the work done to maintain the J! CMS product—you need to be “invited”; that is, you need to know someone who knows someone who is willing to accept you as a “team member”.  The invitation process is obscure and depends on how well someone likes you (as opposed to what skills you may possess).

As a consequence of these things, the number of OSM members has fallen to its lowest level on record.  There are less than fifty active OSM members today.  Further, OSM seems to be in a continual state of turmoil with people resigning from their “team” roles.  It’s for these reasons that people have lost confidence in Joomla, both from a technical perspective as well as from an investment [of time and money] viewpoints.  Because of these factors, it is self-evident that OSM is unable to meet its commitment to the hard work of volunteers who struggle to deal with everyday matters.

These articles do not write themselves you know

Every article I write is the result of careful research and careful word-craft.  I began this article more than a month ago and I postponed finishing it and publishing it because it was depressing to think about how badly the Joomla project that I loved and supported had come to this poor end.  I am not alone in feeling abandoned by the Joomla project that I invested time, money and feeling into.  At one time you could have said there were as many as ten thousand people who used Joomla; today that figure is probably two or three hundred.

I would estimate that there are five or six people in Australia who are still loyal Joomla fans.  Remember that Joomla had its origins in a back-yard in Toowoomba in Queensland.

So … while I think about Joomla (and feel incredibly sad about how the Joomla community seems to have become an elite club for fifty or so people), I do not have the energy to carry on as if nothing has changed.  I also have other interests that consume my time:  my interest in current affairs, relaxing with a good glass of red wine (as I am doing writing this paragraph) and talking with people face-to-face instead of having nonsense arguments on discussion forums.  These are the important things in life:  to live, to love and to leave a legacy.

Thank you for reading my story and I wish you all the very best.

About the author:

Michael Russell has worked in the information technology industry since 1971 and, since retiring from the workforce in 2007, is a website hobbyist specialising in Joomla, a former member of the Kunena project for more than 8 years and contributor on The Joomla Forum™. The opinions expressed in this article are entirely those of the author. View his profile here.