Paving the way to the future

Prologue

This document was created during the “Joomla 8” sprint of the Joomla Production Department, held in September 2025. The sprint was a 3-day event with 14 participants, representing a wide range of different stakeholder types, especially

• Agency owners
• Solo site builders
• Integrators
• Extension developers

with both, active involvement in the community and without any previous involvement at all. 

In 2025 Joomla has to face many challenges which need to be kept in mind. For example Artificial Intelligence is disrupting the web world, speed, efficiency and low costs are becoming more and more important and the market for CMS is more fragmented than ever. Also a visible decrease of market share of Joomla and a high entry barrier is something that needs to be considered.

The challenges in mind, the sprint was split into 3 major steps

• Analysis of status quo: performed with a SWOT analysis
• Gathering of future market opportunities: performed with the “blue ocean” strategy
• Evaluation and prioritization of ideas: performed with a numeric scoring system based on a survey

Based on the results of these steps, the available resources in the project and factual constraints (i.e. our Semantic Versioning policy) a first roadmap towards Joomla 8 was created by the sprint attendees.

Joomla! Product Roadmap

Market Position

Since its first release 20 years ago, Joomla has evolved into an incredibly flexible, powerful, and therefore versatile CMS. Joomla offers a unique all-in-one package in the CMS landscape, built on five essential pillars:

• Content Management: a comprehensive and flexible content model allows for efficient management of content – meaning Joomla is particularly strong in its core domain of content management.
• Feature Richness: the product comes with numerous “power features” such as multilingual support, workflows and access control, which enhance the content model and equip Joomla out of the box for complex use cases.
• Ecosystem: Joomla is well-established and holds a significant market share – resulting in a vibrant ecosystem that develops diverse solutions for common requirements.
• Modern Technical Platform: Joomla provides a contemporary, attractive technical framework, making it perfectly suited for developing custom extensions and applications.
• Digital Sovereignty: Joomla does not belong to any individual or company, nor is it governed by autocratic structures – it belongs to the community. This ensures digital sovereignty at a time when independence from centralized structures is more important than ever before.

Other products on the market may cover some of these aspects equally well or even better – but none offers this particular combination: they are either targeted on simpler sites with bigger market shares (which results in a bigger ecosystem but less features to reduce the complexity and learning curve) or they are built for the enterprise market (which often too small for a lively 3rd-party extension ecosystem).

It is this overall alignment that distinguishes Joomla as a product and defines its position in the market. With Joomla, the majority of challenges in a modern web project can be solved out-of-box, without the need for custom development or external extensions - but if a need can’t be solved with core measures, an active ecosystem and a flexible technical platform allow to quickly and effectively solve any additional challenges.

Featurewise, our market position looks like this:

From this, it also follows which types of projects and users the product is especially suitable for:

Typical projects in this area include:

• Corporate websites, portals, intranets, and extranets
• Websites for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) that go beyond simple digital business cards
• Governmental entities and public organizations of all sorts and size (universities, schools, libraries,...)
• Community associations
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications

“Simpler” projects from this list can be realized by dedicated non-professionals. However, in most cases, Joomla projects should be created by professional users and agencies, and subsequently managed by editors.

Strategy

The outlined strategy for the development of the product is based on 3 main assumptions:

• The currently defined market position for Joomla will stay relevant in the foreseeable future
• The disruption caused by AI and other automated solutions requires a gain in efficiency when building sites to be able to compete
• The quality of the product is not reflected by the current usage numbers - there’s a huge potential for new users

These basic assumptions lead to a number of areas, where Joomla should concentrate its effort:

1. Defend and expand the current market position

We should defend the current position, especially by investing in already existing USPs (Unique Selling Points) like Accessibility (WCAG Compliance - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), Security (TUF - The Update Framework) and Regulatory Compliance (Action Log, Versioning, Privacy Dashboard).

On top of that, let’s even expand the current position by implementing key features that are relevant to the core competence of ‘content management’ and cannot be meaningfully realised in the extension ecosystem like: extended versioning with draft features, POW (Proof-of-work) captcha, automated workflows, extended filtering by custom fields, multisite.

2. Increase efficiency

Let’s make Joomla “AI-Ready” - not by directly integrating AI-based tools into the core (which will be outdated in no time) but by building the foundation to let AI-based tools interact with Joomla. At its core, that requires 

• extensive documentation (so AI can understand Joomla and its possibilities)
• a framework layer to support easy AI integration for 3rd party developers
• an interface that AI can interact with (by improving the current webservices) and 
• a way to expose this information and interface to the AI by building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers.

That strategy will allow both, developers and site builders, to use AI to create Joomla sites and extensions in a very high quality, greatly improving efficiency in their workflows.

3. Increase adoption with simplified onboarding

Joomla is a strong product in its market, but it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. New users don’t experience a real “WOW” effect when they start, because the default template and sample data don’t show Joomla’s true flexibility and power. Some complexity in the user interface and areas of outdated documentation also play a crucial role.

To solve this, we need a better onboarding experience: a modern default template, rich sample data that demonstrates Joomla’s features, and UI/UX improvements such as configurable editing forms.

Based on the needs and requirements in the foreseen future of Joomla the following roadmap was created. Please remember: as an open source project, Joomla’s direction is defined by its volunteers and available resources, therefore all dates are tentative and the proposed focus for each release is subject to modification.

Roadmap

(The individual features will be linked within the next few weeks - status: Oct. 5, 2025)

6.x Branch (2025 - 2027)

• Defend and Expand
• Implement WCAG 2.2 AA compliance for the frontend and the backend
• Extend Content versioning with draft states and by expanding it to more entities and attributes
• Implement built-in POW captcha
• Increase Efficiency
• Massively enhance documentation for end users (user manual), developers (developer documentation) and machines (webservice documentation)
• Improve webservices to enable better machine-to-machine communication
• Refine existing endpoints
• Add oAuth authentication
• Add a “headless-only” mode
• Build MCP servers to enable AI usage - with WCAG in mind
• Built-in MCP server per instance for sitebuilders
• Official MCP server for developers
• Investigate if and how to integrate the AI Framework
• Simplify Onboarding 
• New Sample Dataset, demonstrating Joomla’s extensive featureset
• Editor: Universal link and media features
• UI/UX: Configurable authoring forms
• UI/UX: Intelligent module assignment
• Redirects for renamed / removed / unpublished items

7.x and beyond (2027 and beyond)

• Defend and Expand
• Multi-/Subsite Concept
• Automated Workflows
• Filter items by custom fields values
• Framework-agnostic Templates/Design System
• Rate Limiting Framework
• Increase efficiency
• Ajaxified Backend
• Sidewide Content-Language Filter
• 3rd party dev experience: Standardize horizontal component API
• 3rd party dev experience: Improve default code
• Simplify Onboarding
• New “modern and sexy” default template (target: each major version has a new template).
• UI-Presets for user roles
• Backend-wide Content-Language filter

Additional Considerations

While this paper outlines Joomla’s product strategy and roadmap, there are further areas for the project and OSM that deserve attention to ensure long-term success:

Community Growth
Joomla relies on volunteers. Clear pathways for onboarding, mentoring, and retaining contributors are essential to strengthen the community base.

Marketing and Positioning
Beyond technical improvements, Joomla needs stronger visibility. A structured marketing and communication strategy will help showcase its strengths and attract new users.

Sustainability and Funding
To remain viable, the project should explore funding models, sponsorships, and partnerships that support ongoing development and community activities.

Ecosystem Development
A vibrant extension and service ecosystem is a key differentiator. Supporting developers, agencies, and potential partners (i.e. hosting providers) will help expand Joomla’s reach.

Future Trends
Alongside AI, topics like headless architectures, data privacy, and sustainability in web development will shape the CMS market. Joomla should monitor and adapt to these trends.

Contact

Do you have any interesting ideas or do you want to volunteer implementing one of the features, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Version: 1.0.3
Last modified: Oct 1, 2025

Changes from V.1.0.2:
Write long form of abbreviations and years in the roadmap

Changes from V.1.0.1:
Added paragraph in prologue about challenges.

Changes from V.1.0.0:
Rewording of “improve” in roadmap 6.0, increase efficiency

Document created: September, 08th 2025