In your opinion, what is a WOW-factor? Is it fancy features, shiny stuff or glittering gadgets? When it comes to content management systems, the WOW- factors may lie in completely different things.
I’ve been using Joomla! since its inception in 2005 and have developed a few custom extensions for my own purposes. Along the way, I have dealt with the trials and tribulations of a fledgling new organization that struggled to find the best path down which to lead its followers. It hasn’t always been a picnic.
Someone recently pointed out to me that the upcoming release of Joomla! 6 doesn’t really have much in the way of new features compared to Joomla! 5. There’s no real WOW-factor this time. I respectfully disagree. In terms of fancy features, Joomla may not seem all that exciting, but it makes up for that with not one, not two, but six WOW factors!
WOW-factor #1: Constant Improvement
It’s comforting to know the development team is now working more on core improvements, such as bug fixes, feature completions, stability, security issues, and migration planning. Those things were not the focus back in the 2.5-3.x days, which is when Joomla! was largely trying to improve its popularity. But I, personally, started to become frustrated with the repeated threat of another major framework overhaul that would not migrate forward smoothly. I actually reached a point when I was about ready to say goodbye to Joomla. I felt that Joomla was going to lose followers just because maintaining it was so difficult.
New features and keeping up with industry standards are still very important, possibly even more so than back then. But from my perspective, stability, backward and forward compatibility, and security are supremely important, especially in today’s online climate.
WOW-factor #2: Stability
Has anyone noticed that recently there has been a decreasing number of security vulnerability updates and bug fixes? For instance, there have only been 4 for 5.3. This could be a result of heavy focus on improving the API (application programming interface), advancing with the PHP language and MySQL standards, maybe a little AI (?), or simply more effort being put into reported core issues.
WOW-factor #3: Accessibility
Accessibility is a broad topic and isn’t reserved for people with media access disabilities. Some of this domain involves simply providing more complete documentation, a topic that has been elevated in importance since the release of Joomla! 5.
Joomla and many of its 3rd-party extensions continue to receive augmentations to their ability to easily incorporate the CSS and HTML needed to maximize accessibility as defined by the latest standards.
Improved templates, template overrides and metadata are a few of the features that support this. However, a good bit of this improvement comes from the availability of tools that provide easy ways to test your site’s attributes, including accessibility and performance. We all know that more scrutiny and better visibility to such areas typically leads to better implementation of them.
WOW-factor #4: Backward Compatibility and Migration
It’s well-known that not all hosting providers are created equal. They don’t all make forward progress on things like security and performance easy or even possible in a timely manner. There needs to be flexibility built into the update and migration processes to allow these transitions to be fully vetted and be implemented incrementally over time.
Joomla 4 introduced the Joomla Update component, which does a pretty thorough job of alerting the site admin to issues that might arise if a major update were to be installed at a particular point in time. This feature has been improving since then, and Joomla 6 is no exception to that trend. One significant contributor to the ability to do this job well has been the stabilization of the Joomla API.
But similar to accessibility, Joomla Update relies on extension developers to adhere strictly to their respective manifest options so that it can better inform the admin during the update analysis process. The groundwork is laid for this, which we see happening gradually in the “Joomlasphere” (a.k.a. “Joomla Ecosystem”).
WOW-Factor #5: Future-proof Roadmaps
Joomla’s Roadmap, the release schedule, gives Joomla site admins a way to plan a lot further ahead for changes, allowing them to deal better with hosting provider issues, extension developer lag, and other variables that previously could render them unable to migrate to a newer, more stable, reliable, and secure version in a timely way.
WOW-Factor #6: Increased Community Involvement
There also seems to be a recent increase in community involvement. I think we have the current leadership to thank for that. The effective use of Mattermost and Google Meet has been a boon to the gathering of interest across the international Joomla community as well as improving communication of industry trends, awards, and developments. As with most successful projects, open source or otherwise, communication is key!
Conclusion
So to me, the fact that Joomla has become so stable, so reliable, and so “together” qualifies as a WOW-factor, despite there being visibly little to go ga-ga over in version 6.0. Let’s face it, there’s a reason Joomla recently won in the Best Open Source CMS category of the CMS Critics Award 2025. Our team is definitely doing something right!