Joomla! 4 contributing is started, Joomla! 3.7 is still in development but Joomla! team already thinking forward and gathering contributors to work on Joomla! 4. This will be an evolution of the Joomla! series with the goal of improving both user experience and code quality.
Joomla! 4 contributing is started, Joomla! 3.7 is still in development but Joomla! team already thinking forward and gathering contributors to work on Joomla! 4.
This will be an evolution of the Joomla! series with the goal of improving both user experience and code quality.
Joomla! Need You
Are you a developer or designer who would like to contribute to a CMS that powers over 3% of the web? Maybe your interest is in accessibility or usability instead? Joomla! need you too.- You can make a difference!
This is your opportunity to make a difference in the future of Joomla! Imagine the feeling knowing that millions of people across the world are using software that you contributed towards. - You can have an impact!
Step back for a moment and think about how great it would feel to play a role in creating something truly special. Something with the potential to change the way we use the web and build web sites in the future - that something can be Joomla! 4, be a part of it! - Now is the time
To achieve Joomla! goals you need to start now. With Joomla! 4, the team aiming to have an alpha (and maybe a beta) ready for presentation at the end of May 2017 at J And Beyond.
Note: don't panic about any existing sites! As per Joomla’s development strategy Joomla! Team will be continuing to support Joomla! 3 for 2 years after the last minor version of Joomla! is released (currently this is planned to be Joomla! 3.7).
Joomla! 4 is not intended to provide a massive ground up refactor of Joomla! but intended to give us large functionality improvements with limited backward compatibility breaks.
Workflow Improvements
- Making the dashboard more customisable - Joomla! team understand this is the first thing users see of Joomla! and the need for it to show users relevant useful information is hugely important
- Improved onboarding process for users - Joomla! team understand that with the extra flexibility given by Joomla! it makes it harder to on-board new users. The help screens are not enough these days!
- Parameter Defaults Review - often when Joomla! team added new options to Joomla! they have had to set values to keep backwards compatibility in the system. Joomla! team will review all the defaults in this release to ensure they remain relevant.
Designers
- New templates with Bootstrap 4 bringing an end to the reign of Bootstrap 2
- All HTML will be overridable - with JLayouts there is now no excuse for full customisability.
- Parameter reduction - Joomla! team understand that large numbers of parameters mean that a lot of HTML is polluted by large amounts of PHP. Joomla! team will actively look to reduce the number of parameters in Joomla! where it does not significantly impact the workflow.
Code
Coding will be taking an evolutionary approach to Joomla! with the top level aims of making code more testable to reduce bugs, easier to approach for those involved in the PHP community without excluding people with limited coding experience and making the system as a whole easier to maintain.
Some examples of this are:
- A rewritten plugin system. This will make the plugin system similar to many existing event systems in prominent PHP projects and will provide a big performance boost!
- Bringing in Dependency Injection Containers instead of JFactory. These will vastly improve the testing framework within Joomla! and allow more flexibility for extension developers in the future.
- More components will use the Joomla! Framework - let’s maintain less code. The framework has lots of extra improvements so let’s start using them in Joomla!
- Code Namespacing - this will allow us to stop duplication of class names in the frontend and backend of components and lead us to a path towards HMVC.
- Code Deprecation - reducing the amount of code we have to maintain by removing legacy outdated code. Note that deprecations are being taken on a case by case basis. Joomla! team will almost certainly not be removing everything marked as deprecated
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