JoomlaDay Chicago and JoomlaCamp Chicago News

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of the Joomla 4.0 Beta 2 release.

We believe we can improve on what is already a great product.

Introducing Joomla 4, a brand new way for people to create and manage their content, developed and sustained by a global community of volunteers. Joomla 4 offers you a platform that is reliable, steady, secure and fully equipped with a wide variety of options to build any website.

We invite you to download, install and test the package to improve quality assurance for the forthcoming 4.0 release and to discover the new features introduced in this major release.

What’s new in Joomla 4.0?

We are genuinely committed to making the next generation of Joomla the best Joomla ever. Joomla 4 will provide simplicity and a better user experience while also being a more robust system for developers.

Whether you want to create a business website or start a blog, the most efficient way to do so is with a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is ideal for the entrepreneur who does not have HTML or CSS coding skills or cannot access developer talent.

In the last decade, there have been numerous CMS solutions to choose from, one of which is Joomla. Having relied on this CMS for many years, I have put together the 10 reasons why it works for me and why it should be your CMS of choice:

1. A self-hosted CMS

A self-hosted CMS means it is open-source software. This allows you to download it and put it on any server. Being open-source provides more control over the look and functionality of your website. 

It helps to have the flexibility to create any type of blog or website you want versus being limited by only a few options. 

That’s why so many different types of businesses and organizations use Joomla, including nonprofits, startups, freelancers, media, corporations, and more. For example, I build my company calendar as an open-source software so that anyone can download it and run it on their own site. Lots more creative options including flexibility to customize it to your needs.

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of the Joomla 4.0 Beta release.

We believe we can improve on what is already a great product.

Introducing Joomla 4, a brand new way for people to create and manage their content, developed and sustained by a global community of volunteers. Joomla 4 offers you a platform that is reliable, steady, secure and fully equipped with a wide variety of options to build any website.

We invite you to download, install and test the package to improve quality assurance for the forthcoming 4.0 release and to discover the new features introduced in this major release.

The release of Joomla 4 Beta is getting closer. Reaching this milestone is a crucial moment in the development roadmap of a product, and it means that the stable version is almost there. However, there is still plenty of work to do.

One key feature of Joomla is its extensibility, with thousands of third-party extensions and templates allowing further customization to meet specific needs. This new version of Joomla is a major version, which implies a more significant change in the compatibility of extensions.

To hear first-hand an extension developer approach, we talked with Geraint Edwards, YourSites lead developer.

First of all, we are very grateful for giving us your time in answering these questions.

What will happen with the extensions when J4 is released? Will they be compatible or will the developers have to provide complete new versions?

It is likely that most extensions will need to be updated to varying degrees to make them compatible with Joomla 4. For many ‘straightforward’ extensions this isn’t a particularly difficult exercise and, from my experience, it's feasible to make a single version of an extension compatible with both Joomla 3.9 and Joomla 4.0. Joomla 3.0 has flagged many classes, methods and functions as deprecated and the suggested replacements often work in Joomla 3 and 4 - so the need to version-specific code is limited.

Would you like to get more involved with Joomla? Read more about this month’s highlighted volunteer positions below.

Community Translation Team Lead

The role involves the following:

• Liaise with the marketing team regarding resources that need translation, for example, landing pages, advertisements, video scripts, and other marketing materials
• Set up and manage the translation projects on Crowdin
• Maintain regular communication with the translators
• Monitor the translation progress and contact / find translators to achieve 100% translation levels
• Review all translations in all languages
• Inform those involved with publishing information when a translation is completed / available 
• Expected commitment: minimal  2 hours a week

Read more about the team’s activities here: https://volunteers.joomla.org/teams/community-translation-team 

Accessibility Testers

The role involves the following:

• Testing Pull Requests (PRs) relating to Accessibility (A11y) and hopefully continue testing Joomla! 4 to make it fully accessible
• Expected commitment: averages 2-3 hours a week
• Having an understanding of accessibility and WCAG 2.1 guidelines

• Being able to perform a A11y Audit

Read more about the team’s activities here: https://volunteers.joomla.org/teams/jat-at