You may have seen them in the backend of your Joomla 4 or 5 website: Guided Tours, the ultimate way to get familiarized with your Joomla website. And while Joomla 5 keeps getting better (thanks to our awesome developers), so does Joomla's Little Helper, aka the Guided Tours!

What is a Guided Tour?

A guided tour in simplest terms, shows you around. In Joomla, it can show you around, like explaining the dashboard or new features in a release. It can also guide you through creating/maintaining content on a website, including using a third-party extension. 

Who are Guided Tours for?

We dare say EVERYONE!

• Guided Tours help third-party developers guide end-users and implementers on how to use their extensions.
• Guided Tours help implementers guide end-users on how to maintain content, make updates, etc. on their website.
• Guided Tours help end-users guide other end-users in their organizations to help in the care and maintenance of the organization’s website.

How to Get Started with Guided Tours?

There are core tours in your Joomla site. They cover the basics. Overtime we will make available more detailed versions of the core tours that you will have the option to install.

Wait, did I just say you will have an option to install a tour? Yes. Yes, I did. More on that in a bit.

There are two good magazine articles about the guided tours, one from the end-user/implementer perspective and one from the developer perspective. If you saw or used guided tours in J4 and then moved to J5, you may have noticed there are already enhancements, such as:

• Favorites - the ability to tag tours so they are at the top of the dropdown
• Welcome Tour - automatically displays the first time you access the administrator panel of a fresh Joomla 5.1 installation
• Contextual Tours - tours available based on where you are in your administration panel

So, to try them out, the Take a Tour button is in the top bar. Tap and start a tour. 

How to Create a Tour?

You’ve taken a tour and have an idea of one that is specific to your organization, there is a tour on how to create a tour. This is an interactive tour which means when you are done, you have the base of your new tour.

Ok, picture this scenario, you are an implementer who has a group of clients that need the same or similar tour. You want an easy way to create it and add to each of the sites. Enter the Guided Tours Toolkit.

What is the Guided Tours Toolkit?

The Guided Tours Toolkit is one of the features that will soon be available in the Joomla Extensions Directory. Yup, you heard (read) right, soon you will be able to download tours from the Joomla Extensions Directory. I will get to that in a moment (or a few paragraphs - short ones I promise).

This feature of guided tours is designed to enable the import and export of tours thereby giving you the ability to create once, use often tours that your clients need. In addition, if you plan your tours on a spreadsheet, you can import the tour steps via a CSV (comma delimited) file.

We have a bit more work to do before we release it but you can TEST it on a TEST site and provide us feedback if you’d like. The latest TEST version is available on GitHub.

For those who saw an early preview at JDayUSA in April, you may notice some improvements. We received some great feedback as a result of the quick peek.

How Can I Download Tours?

Olivier has been working with the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) Team to create new categories within the JED:

• Official Tours - these are tours added to the core
• Extensions Tours - tours created by third-party developers for their users
• Miscellaneous Tours - tours that don’t fit the other two categories - this is where the toolkit will live

Keep an eye out for the launch of tours in the JED. The best part, they can be installed through the extension manager like any other Joomla extension.

What Other New Features are Planned?

We have received a number of ideas (thank you) from the community and have worked to incorporate them into a roadmap of sorts. The top 5 ideas so far are:

• Import/Export - we’re testing
• Add Tour to JED - we’re almost there
• What’s New Tour on Joomla Updates not just new installs - we’re almost there
• Packaging Tours - we’re on it!
• Frontend Tours - we’re brainstorming how

There are a few dozen ideas we are tracking, here’s a quick look at what we’ve got so far:

How can YOU help?

So glad you asked 🙂 but seriously, we are looking for community members to help us in a number of ways:

• Testers - as we make changes we need to test that things still work - an hour here and there typically
• Developers - to implement the wonderful ideas shared with us, we need coders to bring them to life
• Third-Party Extension Tours - we need you to create tours and share with us your thoughts
• Content Creators - tours are instructional tidbits where words, images and even videos merge with technology, having people who can help describe, paint a picture so to speak to complement the functionality is needed
• Share Use Cases - if you have a use case that you think a guided tour would be helpful for and don’t already see it, let us know
• Create Guided Tours - extension developers, implementers, etc. create a tour for someone and share your experience with us

There is a Guided Tour MatterMost Channel where you can ask questions, join our discussions, and more. 

We look forward to hearing how you use (or want to use) guided tours!