What we know (and a lot about what we don’t know)?
Should you wait or should you “go”?
Is there too much hype about Joomla 4?
The JED and Joomla! 4
⏩ If you would like to skip the introduction and go straight to the FAQs, click here
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.
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 see