Ever since the Joomla! project announced that J! 3.x would be retired as J! 4 “comes to life”https://developer.joomla.org/news/676-joomla-3-retiring-as-joomla-4-comes-to-life.html in March 2017, the Joomla community has been waiting for news about this historic milestone.  To better prepare people for what has been promised, a number of commentators have written articles—most of them written in ways that people would probably interpret as marketing hype—over the past few years but still leaving a couple of very important questions unanswered.

The two most important—unanswered—questions are

1. When will the first version of J! 4 be released that will be reliable enough for website owners to implement it?
2. When will J! 4 overtake J! 3.x as the focus of the J! community for people who seeking a secure, robust, well-maintained and supported, open source solution with which to build their websites?

These questions are important because of the expectations promised nearly four years ago that J! 3.x was on its way out and therefore people have put their website redevelopment plans on hold waiting for when J! 4 is born.  After all, if a completely new, major software release is only a short time away, why spend your time using a technology that's at the end of its useful life?

This article will discuss these questions and provide you with background information—as best as I have been able to find it—to help you make your strategic plans regarding as to whether to (a) wait until J! 4 has been released, (b) continue to use J! 3.x for the foreseeable future (and possibly migrate to J! 4 later), or (c) abandon J! 4 altogether and go with something else.

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.