Joomla is an open source Content Management System (CMS) for publishing web content. It allows you to build web sites and powerful online applications. That and its zero price tag makes it a favorite option among many businesses and non-profit organizations.
At 3.7% Joomla is the third most popular CMS system, with WordPress and Drupal ahead of it. With over 9% of all business websites, Joomla’s emphasis on accessibility, speed, security and SEO out of the box make it the CMS of choice for sites that want to expand and grow.
The Joomla 4 has been released with vital improvements to Joomla Platform. Such improvements include the website’s speed, optimization, security, performance, and codebase, which could not be achieved with the previous Joomla versions. So let’s take a look at what’s new.
What’s New in Joomla 4
Joomla 4 ships with a lot of improvements and new features. Above all it comes by default with Bootstrap 5 and plain JavaScript scripts. Joomla 4 includes jQuery for backwards compatibility and BS5 compatibility, but jQuery is not used at Joomla 4 core level.
Simplified Installer
The Joomla 4’s installation process is extremely simplified than Joomla 3.x’s. It is now improved to be clean and simpler with 6 simple steps. The sample data and multilingual installation are included in the “Customize Installation” panel.
Admin Dashboard
The new version has now a refreshed and very intuitive admin panel.
Joomla 4 back-end UI comes with lots of improvements to make it more friendly with users and easier to use. The back-end navigation is on the sidebar now with a collapsed option that helps the user to navigate between the menu, content, media, components, and templates.
A redesigned administration area speeds content creation.
New Media Manager
The new, improved Media Manager is one of the eye-catching highlights in Joomla 4. It comes with more friendly user interface and more advanced features:
- Multiple files drag and drop uploading.
- More tools. to manage files: edit name, file preview, file properties.
- Built-in image edition tool: crop images, resize image, rotate images.
Bootstrap 5 Integration with Joomla 4
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for building responsive, mobile-first web projects. The new Bootstrap version 5 is a major rewrite of the entire project to make it even more powerful.
Joomla 4 and its later versions will stay up-to-date with the latest Bootstrap version to prevent conflict and backward compatibility issues.
New Templates
Joomla 4 introduced 1 new front-end template: Cassiopeia and 1 new back-end template: Atum. The template integrates Bootstrap 5 and responsive.
Cassiopeia template, has a cleaner and more elegant look than the old version. The Atum template comes with great improvements in the user-interface and interesting features like the new publishing workflow.
SEO
SEO is always a hot topic, especially in web development. The Joomla 4 version CMS indicates SEO features and specifies these SEO functionalities as listed on the to-do list in the System dashboard option for your site’s Global Configuration.
Coding Improvements
The focus of Joomla 4 is coding quality and performance. There will be a collection of components developed with the new W3C standard: custom elements. Each component uses plain and optimized java scripts for performance with clean and well-optimized HTML markup to give more benefit for developers.
In addition, Joomla 4 restricts the duties of a component. So, a component is asked to only implement its own core functionality. Everything else is pulled out into the system. This is to help to make the extension more clean for coding.
PHP support
Joomla 4 raise the minimum supported PHP version to PHP 7. It is obvious that PHP 5 has already became obsolete and Joomla is making the right decision to support only the platform which will be actively maintained during Joomla 4 lifespan until the next LTS release.
How to Upgrade to Joomla 4
First of all, you may wonder if you have to migrate ASAP? You can take your time, Joomla 3.10 will be supported for 2 more years. So your site is not at risk if you don’t upgrade now.
When you decide to upgrade, the first step should be to update your site to Joomla 3.10. The 3.10 update checker will tell you which extensions are compatible with Joomla 4.0. Then, you just have to follow the steps described in the official documentation.
