Hi all,
Today's one of these great days, where the Joomla community can regroup around a major new release of our preferred CMS: Joomla 5 has just landed minutes ago and is available for all to upgrade to.
What's in it?
No need to re-hash the Joomla.org announcement, you can read all the details there. Joomla 5 has a lot of internal, technical changes and improvements as well as new features. Let's mention:
- Admin template dark mode
- Some Structured data generation
- Performance improvements
- AVIF file format support (for more efficient images)
- Latest version of TinyMCE, the content editor
Will it be trouble?
Such a release could have been a real pain for many (Joomla 4 anyone?) as much old code has been removed and may have caused extensions to break.
The good news is that Joomla 5 comes with a Backward Compatibility plugin.
In short, all the old code removed from Joomla 5 was not in fact removed but put into that plugin. If you have extensions that have not been updated to run natively on Joomla 5, leaving this plugin enabled allows them to run as before.
Smartly, the plugin is automatically enabled when you upgrade a Joomla 4 site to Joomla 5, so the upgrade should be much safer.
Once all your extensions are Joomla 5-compatible, you can disable the plugin for better performance.
Are Weeblr's extensions Joomla 5-ready?
Yes, as of today, all our extensions are "natively" Joomla 5 compatible. By natively I mean that they do not use old Joomla code and do not require the Joomla 5 Backward Compatibility plugin to be enabled.
Simply make sure to update all 4SEO, 4AI, 4SEF, 4Podcast, 4Video or 4Logs to the latest version before upgrading to Joomla 5.
A few things to pay attention to
- Joomla 5 requires MYSQL 8: you may already be using version 8 of MYSQL, but if you're not, this is something you need to discuss with your hosting company
- The admin-side dark mode is automatically active if your browser/computer is set to use dark mode. It can't be disabled at the moment
All in all, Joomla 5 is a continuation of the tremendous effort by the Joomla community, started with Joomla 4, to continuously enhance the CMS.
On our side, being fully compatible with it from day one is the visible part of the commitment we have with the project and our clients that we're here for the long term.
What else?
In the news:
- the appearance of Joomla 5 also means the official disappearance of sh404SEF. sh404SEF is discontinued from today.
- I was invited to speak at JoomlaDay Madrid last week. Fantastic event! I presented 4AI, this was fully recorded and videos are online already (it's in English, but spanish subtitles)
Until next time, be sure to keep all your websites and extensions up to date!
Cheers,
Yannick