Community Magazine Joomla 6, what's in it for you?
14th October 2025 feels like a lifetime away at the moment, but it's all the time we have left to get Joomla 6 planned, built and released.
I'm in my 50s - just - and the planets have aligned to have a little joke. Gary Barclay and I will be releasing the first Alpha on Joomla 6 on Tuesday the 15th of April 2025… Not my planning, but it happens to be Joomla London User Group that night as it's the third Tuesday of the month, and my 60th Birthday!
So yes: dates do have some meaning, some very personal.
So help me celebrate on the 15th by sharing with me now, your thoughts and ideas for Joomla 6.
Core features for all
As part of the process we want to hear from the whole community as to their thoughts about what Joomla 6 should include.
To be clear: the first Major is the chance to remove old code, set the php and mysql for the rest of the series and do those things that have to be done. This first Major is not designed to be feature packed but more of a tone setter for the rest of the series.
What we are not looking for is features that would benefit the few. A shop built in to Joomla would for some be great but for the majority, dead wood, not needed and already catered for in the extensions directory.
Will Joomla 6 be a migration or an upgrade?
That's a great question, and as someone who is responsible for around 100 websites the last thing I want is a tricky migration let alone 100 tricky migrations.
The model we have adopted since Joomla 4, with well planned regular releases, makes the jumps between the Majors smaller and the path between each minor much smoother. The production department has worked hard to make this a reality. Further improvements in the organisation of decisions, pushing out to a wider group have contributed to a smoother route.
So to answer the question: it will be as smooth as we can make it without compromising on security and performance.
But a lot of it will rely on you, the dear user: we need testers. Without testers the great features and improvements sit waiting and miss the cut.
This excellent article by Christiane Maier-Stadtherr https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/march-2024/pizza-has-gone-bugs-and-fun-remain
shows you how you personally can make a difference. With your help we can make this an easy upgrade instead of a migration.
And now it’s up to you!
So to the nub of this article, here is a google form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdheRyZ32cMcTSWOTuKYwvcmryVSxxhSv71dC3rJwm037Vtqw/viewform
We would love you to fill it in and give us your feedback. Let us know what you think should be retired, improved as well as added. This information can be used for the whole of the 6 series and will help inform release managers for some years to come.
So take the 10 minutes to have your say.
Community effort
It's not just about coding. We also need writers, documentation, images and instructive videos.
So we would like to form channels in mattermost https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/november-2022/getting-the-most-out-of-mattermost
to form communities around some of these ideas. Yes, there will be lots of chatter in GitHub, but some people are allergic to GitHub and we need all of you, so there will be spaces for those who are interested in helping in other ways than coding.
With all of your help we can make the 15th April 2025 a day of celebration. Full of new ideas and improvements in the first Alpha, I will be celebrating anyway, it would be great to make it a day for you to celebrate as well.
Some articles published on the Joomla Community Magazine represent the personal opinion or experience of the Author on the specific topic and might not be aligned to the official position of the Joomla Project
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Comments 3
I think a big thing is to make sure that Joomla 4 & 5 extensions still work with Joomla 6 by NOT removing the backwards compatibility plugin. And I say this as it looks like devs continue to shut down or stop updating their extensions and/or updates are coming very little. It's like the extension marketplace is shrinking so I think it's very important that older extensions still work, sorta of like how Wordpress does it. Extensions normally always work from version to version.
That's an interesting point.
B/C breaks are kept to a minimum, but sometimes PHP itself changes and so for security reasons there may be new ways to do things that are more secure.
If an extension is using out of security PHP ways. PHP has moved from a very loose cast language which was prone to introducing errors. Arrays were cast as strings and as numbers, to a more closed cast language. Should we keep backward compatibility at the expense of security and performance?
There are always playoffs
A lot of major OS systems use it in order to stop virus or other things. The app stays within itself. What if somehow you look into making extensions use a sandbox mode if they are outdated.
here is the definition of what sandbox mode means...
"Sandbox mode" in an operating system refers to a security feature that creates an isolated environment where applications or code can run without affecting the main system, essentially acting as a safe testing ground where any changes or potential damage are contained within that isolated space, preventing issues from spreading to the rest of the computer; often used to test potentially unsafe software or files without risking the main system.