A basic usage tutorial for the Joomla! CMS intended for customers of Accredited Design LLC.

joomla4

Accredited Design LLC are experts in the development of Joomla! CMS websites, as well as other CMS's and site frameworks. In our work we pay close attention to developments in technology and upcoming features and systems. This being said, Joomla! version 4 is rumored to be in production. Let's have a look at what it will likely be.

The main details about Joomla 4
The current version of Joomla at the time of this article is 3.7. Joomla 3.8 and 3.9 will be released before Joomla 4 is made available.

Joomla 3.9 will be released mainly as a means to allow easy migration to Joomla 4. Here's the official statement concerning this:

In preparation for Joomla! 4.0, Joomla! 3.9 will primarily be a release containing backports of API changes from the 4.0 development branch to help ease the transition to the next major release for the community. It is planned for 3.9 and 4.0 to release simultaneously.

On April 21st 2015, an update at Google impacted most websites on the web. From April 21st 2015 onward, only mobile and responsive websites will appear in Google search results on mobile devices.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ME?
To put it simply, if your website is not mobile friendly or responsive, your website will not show up in Google's search engine results on most mobile devices! You will become invisible. 

WHAT DOES THIS GOOGLE UPDATE LOOK FOR?
The Googlebot must be allowed to scan your CSS and JS files in order to deem them as mobile friendly.

ANALYZE YOUR WEBSITE
The Google Chrome web browser provides an open source developer tool called, "Lighthouse" that you can use to see how your website is performing:

It's time to migrate your Joomla site

Most Joomla! website owners, implementers, and designers are aware that Joomla! version 3 is the latest major release of Joomla!. The Joomla! Project has recently announced that version 2.5 support ended on December 31, 2014! If you are not already aware, version 1.5 support ended on April 30th, 2012.

BREAKING NEWS 12/14/2015:

It has come to our attention that the Joomla Security Strike Team was notified of a critical security vulnerability and they have just released a patch on 12/14/2015. There was a High Priority Remote Code Execution (affecting Joomla 1.5 through 3.4.5). According to news posted by the Joomla Security Strike Team your site can be very easily hacked if you are not running the latest Joomla version 3.4.6 or later.

Further details can be found here: 

https://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5641-joomla-3-4-6-released.html

This critical vulnerability affects all versions of Joomla below 3.4.6, including Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 versions. Since these series of Joomla are no longer supported, there will be no patches released for Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 websites. It is highly advised that you migrate to Joomla 3 ASAP if you are running these rather outdated versions of Joomla.

If you are running an older version of Joomla and wish to be updated please contact us ASAP and we can help you get your site secure.