A brief history of Joomla! 4

We don’t know for certain when the Joomla! 4 project startedI have been unable to locate any primary sources that indicate how proposals for a new upgrade to J! 3.x came into being and I have to rely on secondary sources that suggest J! 4 originated in 2016..  It’s not vital that we know exactly when J! 4 started; we know it’s been around for a few years.  When new projects kick off there’s usually lots of initial enthusiasm:  people eagerly set about their preparations in anticipation of a new product that’ll be “just around the corner”.  Before long, though, the distance to “the corner” seems to grow larger:  people agitate for “situation reports”—a sure sign of that sinking feeling—when they realise the end of the journey seems to be nowehere in sight and it appears that no one seems to be in the driver’s seat.  In fact, because people have been waiting with bated breath for the imminent arrival of J! 4 for such a long time—“keeping their eye on” J! 4— a lot of people are living with broken websites, unmaintained websites, hoping that J! 4 will miraculously appear and cure their problems.  Hope is not a strategy to run a business—let alone a website; it’s just another excuse, in a long list of excuses, that people make for not doing what they should be doing.

The Joomla! Project Roadmap is an “interesting document”.  If people are basing their businesses—to use Joomla! 4—on that document they could be in for a long wait:  the latest update of that documentdated 28 January 2020 gives no timeframe when J! 4.0.0 stable might be available (unlike previous versionssee https://web.archive.org/web/20180623151651/https://developer.joomla.org/roadmap.html dated 7 June 2018 that forecast J! 4.0.0 stable by end of the 2018 calendar year).  In short, no-one knows when the first stable version of Joomla! 4 will be released.

In the meantime—half-way through 2020, after four years, 12 alpha and three beta releases of J! 4—people are becoming agitated about what to expect and as well as questions about Joomla’s future both as a product and as an organisation.  This article addresses some of the important questions that the community has been asking over the past six months.  We do not have all of the answers; this article draws on snippets of information, “reading the room”, conjecture and guesswork.

This article shows you how to change Firefox’s appearance from tabs on top (where the tabs appear above the URL address bar) to display the tabs below the URL address bar.

Before the release of Firefox v57, it was possible to change the location of the tabs by changing a browser parameter setting.  The setting was

FF still retains that setting but its functionality has been disabled; browser tabs remain on top (above the URL address bar) regardless of this parameter’s value.  We will see how it’s possible to change the location of the tabs.My earlier articles—Firefox: tabs on bottom and Firefox: tabs on bottom (again)—discuss Firefox before v69.  This article updates that advice following the release of FF69.

If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him.  If he is in superior strength, evade him.  If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him.  Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.  If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.  If his forces are united, separate them.  If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them.  Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”, 5th century BC

When I created my first website on the internet, some twenty-plus years ago, it was a fairly nerve-racking experience.  I had dabbled with HTML and Javascript for a couple of years before that but I knew nothing about cross-browser capable websites or CSS or all the other features we take for granted these days, and this internet thing was a whole new experience.  Suddenly my work would be on show for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people to seeI still have a copy of my first website stored on a CD somewhere..

Over time, as I practised my webcraft, I became more confident and adventurous—exploring the opportunities of DHTML, client-server applications, etc.—and, by the time I left the workforce, I was in a good position to use my experience … perhaps to make some spare change.  Who knows?

My first experiments with Joomla! were a shambles.  I must have created forty or more test websites before I came to terms with it.  I spent entire days just reading:  books, online tutorials, forum discussions, anything I could lay my hands on.  Fortunately, I stumbled onto a group of people who were willing to offer me their help and things just snowballed from that.

It’s probably no surprise that, for the first few years of my involvement with Joomla!, I really had no sense of purpose about what I could do with it in my retirement years.

As nerve-racking as it is to put yourself “out there”—spending whole weeks or months preparing for the journey into the unknown—Twitter comes along and it's life-or-death in 280 characters