Development Roadmap

Joomla 4 versus Joomla 5

Joomla is quite notorious in introducing major breaking changes between versions with constant Joomla API renaming & changes. Frustrating extension developers again and again. Joomla has a rapidly declining amount of (free) maintained extensions. As the code base of Joomla is far more shiny than for example Wordpress, the front end user gives a shit as none of the coding standards is actually visible anywhere.

The Joomla development team promised that Joomla 5 will not have any major changes compared to Joomla 4. 

However, this does not mean that Joomla 5 is backward compatible with Joomla 4.  In Joomla 4/5 quite a bit of vital functionality is marked as deprecated and must be adapted for Joomla 6. Lot of these changes are already possible in Joomla 5, however that breaks compatibility with Joomla 4.

End of regular bugfix support for 4.x is mid-October 2024. That would be the start date for migrating all extensions on this website to native Joomla 5. Most website will migrate to Joomla 5 earlier, so if usage on Joomla 4 websites drops below 10%, migration might start earlier.

SEF Plus Joomla 5.1

New functionality (SEO: Add trailing slash behaviour (#42702) and SEO: Improve URL behaviour with index.php (#42704)) in the sef plugin introduced in Joomla 5 breaks backward compatibility to Joomla 4.x and 5.0. As the SEF plus plugin uses the Joomla SEF Plugin to perform the default tasks, there is now a new Joomla 5.1+ version

Roadmap to Joomla 6

Joomla 6 is currently in a very early development and basically not more than a clone of Joomla 5. As all major changes to the Joomla framework are postponed to Joomla 6, it is expected that Joomla 6 will have a lot of breaking changes to Joomla 4/5.