The Future Plan of Joomla 4 and JoomlaShine

After many cups of coffee, Joomla 4 Beta 3 was released some weeks ago with many fixed bugs and updated features. According to joomla.org, all the features of Joomla! 4 are completed and no more new features are going to be added to the stable version. Now, Joomla developers are focusing on fixing the last bugs to get the stable Joomla! 4 release as soon as possible.

So... what will happen until the release day and afterwards?

Future of Joomla 4

Joomla! Development

Joomla! Team aims at releasing a new minor version every 6 months with fixed bugs and new development features. When they work for a minor version, they plan to define a plan for the subsequent 2 minor releases next. They are therefore planning to release the minor versions of Joomla 4 6 months and 12 months after 4.0 with the new features which are missed in version 4.0

The fact that they are now starting development on Joomla 4.1, so that they will have more time to work on bigger new features for the next minor release. The new features of the next version will be announced in time and every developer is welcomed to help in implementing the future features by joining a prepared working group in the Joomla! Enhancement Development Team.

Focused Features

For each minor version, the Team wants to develop one major feature and two additional features that can help to improve Joomla! as well as user experience. Concurrently, the new features should be aligned with the identity of Joomla! which is focusing on accessibility improvements and useability developments. Though, the minor releases are not limited by this defined structure. All the ideas, functionality to implement and features from Joomla! communities are welcome and will be considered to add in the minor version.

Joomla 4.1

As mentioned above, the version 4.1 is expected release 6 months after 4.0 and is now developing. The media manager, which is completely rewritten and is a better version in Joomla! 4.0, will be more improved in this minor. Beside the uploading image functional, the media manager in version 4.1 is expected to be a true media managing facility with the ability of size and metadata customization, handling and specifically playback of video and audio and support for documents.

Otherwise, this version will come with other supporting features such as signed updates, poor mans CRON. The accessibility features are going to added in this version include:

• Allow to Hide/Unhide columns in list views per user
• Allow to turn off/on the user notes feature to reduce elements on the screen.
• Improve accessibility of media manager
• Make Toolbar accessible
• Add keyboard navigation to list and edit views

Besides, Joomla! team also plan to add some useability features such as:

• Change the state of an item in the list view by AJAX call instead of reloading the page.
• When creating a new menu item, load the (in this session) last used menu type by default.
• Allow default menu items in different languages in the same menu.
• Images/Links as custom fields
• Dedicated "trash" icon/button for navigation.

Joomla 4.2

The Joomla! 4.2 is expected launch after 1 year of version 4.0 and 6 months of 4.1. This version is now considered with a rough idea about the main feature, A multi-domain. Some support features are going to be added including content drafting and health check. Though, some minor features are to be defined and are seeking the contribution of Joomla! community.

JoomlaShine Future Plan for Joomla 4

To prepare for the official release of Joomla 4, we are going to do as follow:

Make all of our products compatible with Joomla 4

It is the number 1 priority in our plan. In order to improve JoomlaShine user experience, all current JoomlaShine products include JSN Templates (Gen2) and JSN Extensions will be updated and tested to ensure they run smoothly with Joomla 4.

In addition, we also look forward to making a huge improvement in developing extensions both in feature and UX/UI design with the aim of having a cleaner and more robust codebase. So that you can soon experience a more powerful, ease to use JSN extension especially JSN PageBuilder 4 that will worth your investment.

On the top of that, you have nothing to worry about the compatibility of JSN products with any version of Joomla. The update process will be informed to you as soon as possible.

Keep you updated with Joomla 4

Another big part of our plan is going to update and publish frequently all information about Joomla 4 to inform and notice what is going around with this generation. It can be the articles in our blog about news, updates, bugs or hot issues.

Final words

After many years of development and improvement, the new generation of Joomla! will come in some weeks later and you can soon experience. We hope that this outlook of the future of Joomla 4 will give you an overview about what will happen next and makes you as excited as we are for what will come.

As a trusted Joomla provider, making sure all JoomlaShine products compatible with Joomla 4 is a must, and we are working very hard for it. And we hope those upcoming works will bring great value to Joomla community in general and to JoomlaShine users in particular.