I’ve been using Joomla since it was Mambo. This month I’ve installed the Joomla 4 “Beta Dev” version and here are a few of the new features you should get excited about...

Last year Joomla 4 made substantial progress towards a public release. 

Joomla Security Team Sprint, Cologne, May 2018. I guess we all agree that it's one of Joomla's key priorities to offer a software that is as secure as possible, as this plays a crucial role in the user's experience running Joomla - a hacked user, is a very unhappy user.

On November 17, the first Alpha for Joomla 4 was released. Whilst this release was intended for developers to check their extensions as soon as possible for their compatibility the Joomla 4 User Interface Team has something nice in store for you. In the last few years, we have been planning, discussing and drafting different concepts of the Joomla 4 backend. First of all: the chance to work on the overall backend user interface is a really big honour for us and we say thank you to all those that welcome us to such a great team. It’s a pleasure to work with such passionate people. Our challenge was to design a backend that mostly fits into the given technical structure of Joomla and to change as much as needed, but as little as possible. We want to invite you to take a ride through the draft of the Joomla 4 Backend design.

The 2017 Community Leadership Summit held in Austin, Texas was both inspiring for and inspired by Joomla's new Leadership Team. Joomla is not alone when it comes to challenges of a community of contributors, but as the largest all-volunteer-managed project; fortunately, we are getting many things right. Four of Joomla's leaders both learned and shared new tricks at CLS17.

Joomla’s first Super Sprint was held at CitizenM Bankside in London last weekend from the 21st to 23rd of January 2017 We had attendees from 15 countries (Bratislava, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Malaysia, Netherlands, Spain, St Maarten, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and USA), and a total of 37 attendees with 6 teams officially represented.

The Joomla! Certification Program is now live and we had 4 exam sessions held since its launch on last September. The whole certification program was designed from scratch with so many processes involved such as creating and maintaining questions, managing test centres (known as Joomla! Learning Partners), creating a secure a platform to deliver the exam and others. First, four exam sessions revealed what are the steps need to be taken next!

On December 1st, 2012 a call was made by Sarah Watz for volunteers to help the Certification Program come alive. Since then several articles published and some demo sessions conducted at Joomla! events to make it happen. Over the time the certification team structure changed with new members on board and working actively for the past two years to make this happen. We are excited to announce the Joomla! Certification will be available from September 1st 2016.

At the recent J&Beyond Joomla conference in Barcelona a new SEO team was formed. The team agreed on the following mission statements:

Over the past year it has become evident that better User Experience (UX) is being demanded by our community. We believe UX is critical to the future of the Joomla community and see an opportunity to improve our platform while bringing our community together in new ways. We’ve spent the first few months of 2016 rebuilding the JUX team and we want you to be involved!