Joomla 3 EOL

As documented in the announcement of Joomla 3.10 as well in a recent magazine article, Joomla 3.10 is a bridge between the Joomla 3.x series and 4.x. It will be initially released together with 4.0.0 and starting from there gets two years of official support.

We as a project have learned from the lessons from the last major upgrade from 2.5 to 3.x and for that reason changed our approaches in many ways in the development of Joomla 3.10 and 4.0. This also includes that we make early plans for the End of Support (EOS) and how we want to improve the messaging to our existing users. This article here covers the EOS messaging we are shipping with 3.10.

End of Support messages for 3.10

The EOS Plugin shipped with 3.10 has a rolling approach where a message is shown in the backend that changes over the time that the end of support date comes closer. This way we want to be proactive to inform our users about the upcoming end of support of the currently used version of Joomla.

The intention is to roll out the following messages out to the backend users as time progresses:

How to acknowledge a message

You can acknowledge all messages except the last message by using a “Snooze this message for all users” button. This effectively hides the current message from the top until the next message is triggered.

I do want to specifically address my clients

We can fully understand this request and we have you covered here too. In order to give you full control over the message to the clients you can use the core language override feature to create language overrides for the language strings used within the plugin:

I don't want any message to be shown to my clients

As mentioned above our solution is plugin-based and therefore you can disable the plugin when you wish to ignore the warnings but at this point, you are on your own to communicate to your users. We strongly recommend keeping this plugin active and just choose to overwrite the specific messages.

Thanks

A big thanks goes to the CMS Release Team who discussed the ideas and string proposals with me, provided feedback and helped to develop and test the plugin that's now shipped with the core. Thanks!