2025 going away, Welcome 2026

Hi all,

I'm not very keen on end-of-year posts, but I do feel that this time it's worth looking back a bit, and more importantly, also looking forward. So here I go, 2025 and 2026 from my perspective as a Joomla SEO and content extensions developer.

What happened in 2025?

A lot. But I think I can easily break it down into two parts: development and community:

Active development: AI is not coming. It’s here.

At a time when it may appear (some) developers are moving away from Joomla, I think it’s important to remember that many of us are not going anywhere.

2025 was a very busy year in terms of development and releases. I had never done this before, but today I took the time to just count releases throughout 2025: a total of 37 new releases across 8 extensions:

Importantly, most of these were feature releases, bringing in new functions and not just mere bug fixes or small adjustments.

A big focus was to bring 4Analytics up to speed in terms of features and stability. After that, 4Analytics was the obvious candidate to be the first extension to get AI-based enhancements. 

Aside from 4AI, which is of course AI-only, 4Analytics version 4 was the first to get a side-serving of AI, in the form of AI-powered analysis, straight into your email inbox. In case you missed it, read the details of the announcement here.

Community involvement 

On my side, community involvement mostly means participating in JoomlaDays and online groups. I was extremely lucky this year to participate in multiple events, both online and in person:

• JoomlaDay USA
• JoomlaDay Netherlands
• JoomlaDay Spain
• JoomlaDay France, our first hybrid event: in person and live stream
• Several user groups: Website Design company owners group, Joomla Australia user group

My take: The Joomla community, while not as large as it once was, is still pretty active and it won’t be stopping next year either with the upcoming rebirth of JoomlaDay UK.

Welcome 2026

So what happens next? More of the same I guess, and a lot of changes as well.

More AI

After 4Analytics, work has already started to add AI-based analysis to 4SEO. I look forward to getting insights from the Google Search Console’s tons of data in a more digestible way.

Before AI, there’s already a new version of 4SEO (already available for testing) with a much-needed improvement of website content changes detection.

More SEO

Something I’ve encountered a lot in 2025 is people saying: "With AI search, why bother with SEO?".

While a legitimate question to ask, it’s important to stress to website owners that AI search tools such as Gemini, ChatGPT or Perplexity do not change the need for (proper) SEO work in any way.

Yes, for general knowledge, historical questions, these systems just draw from their training data, and you may or may not be part of that.

But training data is the source of LLM hallucinations, and therefore for most questions, ChatGPT, Gemini and others all start by ... performing a search on Bing or Google to respond to you.

Yes, AI search changes some things at SEO level, particularly in terms of content and keyword management (hint: don’t focus on keywords anymore), but the general process is still the same: to do well in AI, you need to do well in search and SEO.

More community

I do intend to participate in every Joomla event I can, including the ones listed above, and new ones.

If you are part of a Joomla user group, feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in me presenting one of our extensions or discussing any Joomla matter.

That’s all for now, I wish you all the best for 2026 and thank you for both reading this (lengthy) bit of prose as well as your continuous support for my extensions.

Cheers,

Yannick

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