1. Administrator and Site Templates have been updated.
The fully redesigned layout of the administration section is the first thing you’ll notice about Joomla 4. The new Admin Dashboards are meant to help site managers rapidly and easily improve their site management interface for themselves or their clients.
To get you started controlling your Joomla 4 site, the Home dashboard displays Admin modules such as Logged-in Users, Latest Actions, Site Information, Notifications, system shortcuts, and more. Content, Menus, Components, and Users dashboards follow, allowing you to handle content, menus, components, and users with ease.
There is always a place to click on to add a module to modify the dashboard on each dashboard.
Cassiopeia is a new front-end template, and Atum is a new back-end template in Joomla 4.
3. A Stronger Codebase
With the elimination of all 3.x outdated functionality, Joomla 4 has an efficient and clean codebase. One of the most significant developments in Joomla 4 is the introduction of PHP namespaces, which allows developers to create more powerful and inventive applications.
By combining classes that execute the same activity, PHP namespacing provides for greater organisation. You can also use the same class name for both frontend and backend classes. To learn more about Joomla 4’s namespace conventions, consult the official documentation.
4. Integration with Bootstrap 5
Bootstrap 5 is a complete rebuild of the Bootstrap project in order to make it even more powerful. The excellent thing is that Joomla 4 comes pre-installed with Bootstrap 5! This means that Joomla 4 and subsequent versions will always use the most recent Bootstrap version to avoid conflicts and backward compatibility difficulties.
Bootstrap has evolved beyond jQuery, just like the web has. Because most of the functionality in jQuery is already supported by JavaScript standards and the most popular web browsers, Bootstrap 5 has abandoned support for jQuery and Internet Explorer. Because Google considers page speed to be one of the ranking factors, this is a significant improvement.
With the next major Joomla version, you’ll get to enjoy all of the excellent features Bootstrap 5 has to offer, like an upgraded grid system, custom form controls, and a new icon collection.
5. (WCAG) 2.0 AA Compliant Accessibility
One of the most significant aspects, accessibility assistance, has been improved in Joomla 4. It complies with WCAG 2.0 Level AA, which means that Joomla 4-powered websites are usable and intelligible by the vast majority of individuals with and without impairments.
Due to its built-in usability for both frontend and backend templates, there is no need to spend in any extra extensions or plugins. Anyone can administer a Joomla website with this functionality, which is a huge benefit for anyone who has previously struggled with Joomla’s accessibility.
6. Workflows Have Improved
The new Workflows feature will ensure that jobs are completed more quickly and by the appropriate personnel. This is a feature that content authors will absolutely adore!
You may specify the process stage and allow administrators to examine the article before it is published with the new Joomla 4 workflow functionality. You can now create user groups, grant limited access control, and assign approvers and posters to your article or blog.
7. New Manager For Media
Joomla 4’s new media manager has a sleeker UI and improved picture editing capabilities. In comparison to Joomla 3, it is far more user-friendly and offers more advanced capabilities. With the addition of multi-file upload and drag-and-drop uploading, it’s now even more efficient and convenient.
Images can now be edited directly from the backend. When you hover your mouse over an image, you’ll see options to Preview, Rename, Edit, Get a sharing link, Download, and Delete it.
Crop, resize, and rotate your photographs are just a few of the fundamental alterations you can make with the image editor.
8. Email Templating
The new customisable HTML Mail templates are another feature of Joomla 4 that brings significant value. We had to create a custom language override in Joomla 3 to edit system emails. Unless you used a third-party plugin, we were only able to send emails as plain text. You no longer need to employ third-party plugins to alter your Joomla emails; instead, you may do so directly within Joomla!
The new Mail Templates component allows you to combine HTML formatting and plain text in your emails to make them look significantly more professional. In Joomla 4, you may choose from a variety of Mail Templates that can be readily changed to fit your site’s needs.
9. Search
Smart search in Joomla 4 features a lot of enhancements over previous Joomla searches, and it’s the best one yet. In Joomla 4, the com search component is replaced with Joomla smart search, which includes new options for the active search index.
When you use the active search index, Joomla will automatically index new items for the search results whenever you add new content to the website. Bid farewell to manual indexing!
10. Enhanced Safety
You can rest assured that your Joomla-powered website will be more secure than ever thanks to several architectural modifications and quite well code. New security capabilities, such as support for prepared SQL statements and the ability to manage security headers from within your site, make it even easier to defend your site.
Joomla 4 includes new tools for the Joomla Core to assist site integrators with header setup. This allows a broader range of users to comprehend and configure the headers, as well as apply some of the fundamental security features by default.
11. Joomla 4 SEO & Performance
You obtain the correct page structure without any further extensions because SEO is incorporated into the page architecture. If a website and pages are put up properly, Joomla 4’s major features and fundamental benefits have a better potential to rank very high than competing CMS.
Lazy Load is included in Joomla 4 as a built-in plugin. It will automatically lazy load all images once it is enabled, resulting in faster-loading pages, improved user experience, and higher organic rankings for your website. Your Joomla site will undoubtedly be more powerful and faster as a result of all the upgrades to the codebase and core architecture!
