Joomla 4 Migration

1 April 2023

Last year I advised all clients whose websites had been built using Joomla version 3 that a major new long term release, Joomla 4, had been available for some time and Joomla would be withdrawing support and security updates for Joomla 3 in August 2023. So it was time to look at migrating websites.

Joomla 3 has served us well since I migrated sites to it about 9 years ago. So far I have successfully migrated 16 sites to Joomla 4, with varying degrees of difficulty. The first thing we noticed was a noticeable improvement in speed. All the Joomla 4 websites are out performing the Joomla 3 ones.

The back end administration is more logically and clearly arranged, and front end management now includes all custom modules (the ones that work with the Editor) as well as the Ignite Photo galleries which is the main component I use.

In general the migration is a lot more straightforward than the previous migrations (from Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 2.5).

All Joomla 4 sites are now using PHP 8. The Joomla 3 sites were running on PHP 7.4. Anything earlier now doesn't work properly and PHP 7.4 is also no longer being supported.

Joomla 4 also now packs a more extended range of features, reducing the need for plugins and extensions. The problem with extensions is when a developer decides to discontinue supporting them, then at some point they become a security risk and we have to replace them. So the less extensions we have to use, the better.

Hopefully Joomla 4 will serve us as well and as long as Joomla 3 did.