They account for around 0.3% of ALL Joomla sites according to W3Techs (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-joomla).
Joomla's official stats (which were introduced near the end of life of Joomla 3 - https://developer.joomla.org/about/stats.html) are far less accurate obviously (e.g. they don't account for Joomla 1.5 > 2.5 sites or older Joomla 3 releases) but still show around 10% of sites use Joomla 4/5, after 3 years of their release. And these stats can be disabled by users of Joomla sites (most do).
This means adoption for these versions is close to non-existent. A sad reality, but an understandable one (read my posts on May 30th at https://x.com/joomlaworks for additional context).
There is literally nothing to say about how things have evolved for Joomla.
At this rate, it will probably be a dead software project within the next couple of years.
It's not just the users that are de-motivated, it's the developers too (the Joomla core developers). Few people will enjoy working on Joomla if no one uses it. It just makes sense.
As such, and given that we're strongly invested in Joomla 3 (in some of the largest news/media site implementations worldwide with Joomla), we don't plan on giving up on K2 (or Joomla 3). In fact, our goal is to pivot and work on a possible fork, unless a miracle happens and the Joomla core team gets their shit together and works on a true/seamless Joomla 3 to Joomla 5 (or 6?) upgrade.
The fork is a reasonable path for us for many reasons but I'd list the following ones here (for now):
- It'll be exciting to go from K2 (a "half" CMS so to speak) to a full CMS. Any crap that didn't work or half-worked on J3 will be fixed.
- Sky's the limit. Really. No stupid politics, irrelevant conventions, idiotic patterns to follow. We have a clear goal for K2 (and Joomla) and that's what we're gonna work on. That goal is a fast, reliable. modern CMS that leaves people asking "why WordPress?"
- Some will nag Joomla 3 uses old code. No it doesn't. It uses a certain design that was popular at the time it was introduced. The only change that is required is for it to be updated so it catches up with PHP's latest versions (for the record, we actively run sites with Joomla 3 / K2 on PHP 8.2). It's a mature code base that can be gradually improved.
- The fork could be introduced in 2 phases. Phase 1: A re-branding for existing sites to move over their content from com_content to K2 (far less work than switching to Joomla 4/5) and existing Joomla/K2 sites to freshen up their backend. Phase 2: This would be the part we lighten up the core. This means com_content & components like banners, newsfeeds, messages etc., their respective modules and plugins and generally other accumulated crap (like User Notes) that literally noone ever used will be stripped off Joomla. Either way K2 can reproduce most of these stuff far better.
- Any design changes will be subtle and NOT affect existing Joomla extensions that respected the Joomla UI design. It will also certainly NOT affect extensions that brought in their own design/MVC and so on (think AcyMailing, page builders etc. etc.).
- If our friend Ryan provides his blessing, we would also love to swap the current Joomla WYSIWYG editor with JCE Core. If not, it's always available either way. We will just upgrade TinyMCE and still install our beloved JCE. This would also be a good time to standardize things like "editor xtd" buttons in a way that they better integrate with the WYSIWYG editor...
- Features and custom extensions we've used for large scale projects could be integrated in the new CMS, if it makes sense for most users to have. E.g. fast search powered by Elasticsearch is a no-brainer (and we can throw that Smart Search crap out for good).
The point is to do something that's fun, while professional at the same time.
Backward compatibility will be our holy grail. Anyone that tells it can't are either lazy or just plain bad programmers (hell, we've maintained K2 for Joomla 1.5 to 3 for 15 damn years).
We're already in touch with partners to finance this move. On the long term, all we need is a couple of devs, working full time.
The next big phase will be infrastructure as required for any modern CMS. That means rebuilding something like the JED, working on documenting use and code etc. At the same time, it's practical to keep everything to a minimum. E.g. there is no reason to use our own forum, but probably go for something like GitHub so we can have everything in a single place: code and discussion, coupled with solid anti-spam (cause let's face it, that's what forums suffer from these days).
By keeping things lean and simple, we will work less on infrastructure and more on the CMS's code and features.
If you ask "why now", I can respond with 2 things:
1) There's been plenty of time for people to switch to Joomla 4/5. Very few did.
2) It's MUCH worse waiting things out to chart their predefined course than actually fucking doing something about it, even if it fails or doesn't work out.
Follow up blog posts will provide more insight into how things will play out in the coming months and how others can join this effort.
P.S.
If you have any questions, please use Twitter/X to communicate these to us (@joomlaworks).
