The next major version for Joomla! has been on the radar for some time but lacking follow through, for reasons both organisational and technical. At JandBeyond, May/June 2015 in Prague the community took matters into their own hand and set up a “make it happen” session to discuss Joomla 4.

Requirements were discussed firstly from a user perspective and later from a technical perspective, drawing heavily on a series of blog posts by Nicholas Dionysopoulos.

Brainstorming, the requirements were divided into “must have” and “would like”. The goal being a “must have list” that results in a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) for Joomla!. The least number of issues with the biggest impact, Items touching upon backward compatibility ( BC ), would go in the “must have” column. Items building upon new BC items would be moved to the “would like” column.

With any major release, backwards compatibility is and has been much discussed. For Joomla 4 we are aiming for a one-click migration. The one-click migration  is a challenging objective for the Joomla core, but certainly for the extensions. We will need to put effort in communicating and training to make all of this happen.

The result of this community driven approach will need to be discussed and refined further, as we also need more information on architecture, UX/UI, and last but not least verification with the Marketing Team. With the Marketing Team’s help we want to ensure we make decisions on data/facts and not on feelings of a few individuals.

It was amazing to see how much can be accomplished in a few hours of face to face discussion regarding the perceived requirements. 

As for the way forward, we are taking a quote out of Einstein’s quote book 

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, we opt for a different more guided approach. We will use an agile way of working, having a planned list of features to work on during sprints (fixed periods of time) should allow us to have something to show for every couple of weeks, and report back to the community.

Having taken these results back to PLT it was decided to expand the “make it happen” initiative into a formal Joomla 4 working group http://volunteers.joomla.org/working-groups/joomla-4-working-group with a Glip team-room “Joomla 4 Working Group” to discuss. 

We aim to be a collective of participants, we are no “academic debating group”. Anybody willing and able to contribute is welcome to join, there are no secrets here, only doers. Contact me and we will take it from there.

As this is a large undertaking, parts of the may be split of in satellite groups. Groups that have/are been formed focus around Architecture (http://volunteers.joomla.org/working-groups/joomla-4-architecture) and UX/UI.

Kind Regards
Marco Dings ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
PLT, Joomla 4 Working Group Manager
Joomla! 4 Working Group