Community Magazine

You probably know by now: Joomla 4, our next major version, is on the way. Over the past few months, many extension developers have been working hard to get their extensions ready for Joomla 4 and make the migration as smooth as possible. In previous issues of the Joomla Community Magazine, we interviewed various extension developers: small ones, big ones, famous ones and not-so-famous ones. This month we talked to Sander Potjer at PWT Extensions.

When Abhishek Das was looking for a more dynamic way to manage his blog website, he tried several content management systems. He chose Joomla because of its flexibility. Abhishek wasn’t trained as a web developer (he studied mechanical engineering), but after his first website, he started developing extensions nevertheless and learned programming during the process.

If you’ve ever migrated your website from one major version to another, for instance from 1.5 to 2.5 or from 2.5 to 3, you may have experienced difficulties with extensions not being fully compatible. So with Joomla 4 on the way, you might want to know if your extensions will be ready on time. That is why your Joomla Community Magazine asks the developers! This month, we interviewed Tassos Marinos who guaranteed us his extensions are 100% compatible already.

More and more extension developers have been very busy getting their extensions ready for Joomla 4. So when this next major Joomla version comes out, you may very well have a smooth migration because of this. In the past few months, we interviewed a great number of developers about this subject. This month we talked to Andrei Cristea at RSJoomla, who has good news for us: their extensions will be compatible with Joomla 3.x as well as Joomla 4.

Steven Trooster’s first Joomla website was a festival site. The main challenges: an event calendar, a registration form and a mailing list. And on top of it all, the site had to be multilingual. Steven was experienced in building sites using Dreamweaver and other tools, but he hardly used a content management system before (except for a short fling with Typo3). How did he learn? With the help of the community!

With Joomla 4 on the horizon, extension developers are working hard to get their extensions compatible with this new major release. Nobody wants to be the developer of an extension that breaks their clients’ websites. So they are all removing outdated code and replacing it with code that is up to the standards of today (and tomorrow). In this issue, Jan Pavelka from Phoca gives us a little insight into how they work, and of course he answers the big question: will Phoca extensions be ready on time?

You probably know that Joomla 4, our next major Joomla release, is getting closer and closer. But what about your extensions? Will they be compatible with this upcoming major version, or will they break your website(s)? The best way to find out is to ask the extension developers! For our March issue, we interviewed Yiannis Christodoulou from WEB357, who is happy to say that most of their extensions are fully prepared for Joomla 4.

With Joomla 4 on the way, some extension developers are still working on the compatibility of their extensions. Others haven’t even started yet (guys, you really should at least have started by now). And others, like AcyMailing… well, if you use it, you may know this already: AcyMailing’s latest version (7) is fully compatible with Joomla 4. Alexandre Derocq from AcyMailing is more than happy to share his thoughts on this with us.

From coders to content managers and from designers to developers: everyone in our community has had a starting point. And we all learn in different ways. Dénes Székely, for instance, started out as a programmer, created his first websites by using raw HTML and Javascript and discovered Mambo when he was looking for a way to manage a large, multilingual website.

As a Joomla user, you may wonder whether the Joomla! extensions and services you use will be compatible with the upcoming major version, Joomla 4. What better way to find out than asking the developers? For our February issue, we had the pleasure to interview Robert Deutz from BackupMonkey, a dashboard you can use to backup, update and maintain all your websites at once. And together with the guarantee that their service will be fully J4-ready, he also gives us a lot of useful tips for offering maintenance to our clients!