Joomla! Community Magazine™

For the July 2023 issue I had written a Joomla Magazine article about my first experiences with Joomla 5.0alpha1. I started with an empty installation and tried out some features: Creating articles, installing and using extensions. Now we are in October 2023. The final release of Joomla 5.0.0 is out since October 17, 2023, as well as the “bridge release” Joomla 4.4.0. One day later, I had all my sites on J4.4.0 without significant difficulties.

My next goal was a reality check for Joomla 5.0.0!

My name is Michael Michael (yes really) and I suspect I may be a very typical Joomla user. I have a full-time job completely unrelated to web design. Almost twenty years ago I wanted to build a website for a personal project and found Mambo. I loved it and what it became in Joomla.

As many of you have heard, PHP 7 became End of Life last month, on November 28th. You probably also heard that this is terrible news for the security of your site and / or that upgrading your site to PHP 8 is a dreary task. While neither affirmation is the absolute truth, there are always a few kernels of truth in every plausible lie. Let's see what the end of PHP 7's service life means for your site and what you can do about it in pragmatic, practical terms.

Joomla 4's now available, but if you're thinking about upgrading from Joomla 3.9, here's some important things to keep in mind before you click the Update button.