Joomla – One of the second most popular content management systems (CMS) Just behind WordPress, have recently announced the release of the alpha version of Joomla 4.
Although there is only alpha version of Joomla 4 out there still Joomla developers and its fans are already liking it so much because of the many new features and benefits this new version is providing.
With being an open source CMS and developed by the volunteered Joomla Developers from all around the world, it is hard to tell the exact date of the official release of Joomla 4. But as per the official website, Joomla 4 is going to be released in the next 6 months.
If you want to know what’s new in Joomla 4 then hold on, we are going to tell you each and everything in detail. But if you are in hurry and want a brief overview of Joomla 4 then, Joomla 4 have a better user experience and code quality improvements. It also got Bootstrap 4 integration, raise minimum supported PHP version to PHP 7 which was 5.3.10 earlier, new media manager, back-end UI improvements, and fully responsive.
There are lots of New features and benefits in Joomla 4, let’s talk about them in detail.
Whats New in Joomla 4
New and Intuitive Admin Panel
Joomla 4 comes with the new and a very Intuitive admin panel. Joomla 4 developers integrate the latest version of Bootstrap i.e BootStrap 4 to develop the new core UI.
Admin panel is the first thing which a user sees after signing in the admin area of the website. If the admin panel seems to be more confusing and congested then might the user don’t want to use it again. This is the reason why Joomla developers are trying very hard to come up with a new and a very engaging Admin Panel.
Joomla 4 and it’s all the future versions will stay up-to-date with the latest Bootstrap version to prevent any conflict and compatibility issues
Joomla 4 is going to come up with the all-new, Improved and Responsive Backend to make it more user-friendly and engaging. There is also a Sidebar Collapsing Option in the backend to give space for the sub-menu bar. When the users click on 1 menu, the main one will be collapsed with icons.
Joomla 4 also introduced two new templates: Cassiopeia for frontend and atum for backend template; both the templates are integrated with Bootstrap 4 and are responsive.
If you want to get the feel of how it looks in person, you can do that too. Just download the development branch of Joomla 4 from Github and test it by our own. Joomla 4 backend is designed in such a way that users can easily get the relevant information on the dashboard.
MVC layer Implementations
In Joomla 4, support for namespaced component classes is provided. “There will be restrictions on the duties of a component. So, a component will be instructed to perform only its core functionalities. The rest of the things will pull out into the system” – said Marco Dings at JWC 2015.
This approach allows any component to take advantage of new capabilities that are designed to be used across extensions and keep the coding of extension very clean.
New Media Manager
Joomla 4 also comes up with New Media Manager which help the users to manage their media files easier. They can structure the folder system, manage files easier and also configure specific permissions for each user’s role.
Removal of jQuery from the core
There is the removal of jQuery from the core of Joomla 4.0. It is done in order to In order to avoid any conflicts with Other Libraries and also to improve the load time.
Simplified Joomla code and coding
This is the most loving new feature of Joomla 4, well at least for the developers. There will be a significant improvement in Joomla 4 core coding which makes it to be more testable and easier to maintain.
There are also many new improvements in Joomla 4 like a new rewritten plugin system, Dependency Injection Containers to replace JFactory, Joomla framework which is going to help the Joomla Developers for sure.
All New CSS Framework
As discussed above, The Joomla 4 will come up with the all new and modern CSS framework i.e BootStrap 4 leaving behind the old CSS framework Bootstrap 2.
It must also be noticed that all the new release of Joomla from Joomla 4 will always stay up to date with the latest Bootstrap version present at that time.
Along with this, there is something new called JLayout to develop a common JavaScript library proxying to Bootstrap. This will help the coder to run all the Joomla Extensions easily on all Joomla Templates.
Improved SEO
Everyone knows the importance of SEO in Web development and luckily Joomla always take care of that. In the previous version also there is lots of SEO support and the same goes with Joomla 4. It is indicated that SEO features is already listed on the to-do list to pimp up your SEO Game and hopefully it will be ready in the stable version.
Easy Installation Process
Setting up a Joomla website is not a very Hectic Task but In Joomla 4, it is going to be more sorted out. Joomla 4 installation process is more simple and easier for a user to get it done. The sample data and multilingual installation are included in the “Customize installation” step so that user can set up Joomla and launch their website without any issue.
Lots of Colors and awesome Typography
Last but not the least, Joomla 4 comes up with lots of Colors options and new Typography. Roboto will be the base font for Joomla 4.0. It is because Roboto offers lots of flexibility, such as the use of use of light, thin, bold, regular, medium and black weights to match the website design.
In Joomla 4, colors in the admin panel will be provided as per the accessibility of the user. There will be a foreground color and background color of the text which a user can choose. Along with all these, there will be a Dark Blue color sidebar which looks appealing. The light grey color will be used for the whole user interface.
So these are some of the various new features which are going to come in Joomla 4. As the Joomla 4 is still in development phase we can assume some new features along with all this.
