Blog

InspireTheme and Joomla 4

As you guys know, Joomla 4 is quite a hot topic at the moment. It is expected to be released this year, probably at the end of the summer.

Since Joomla 4 will be a major new release, there will be quite some changes in the CMS. I will not go into details about what exactly will be changed as this is not the purpose of this post, but to summarize it, there will be many back-end and front-end changes. And the biggest and most important front-end change is the switch from (the quite outdated) Bootstrap 2 to the recently released Bootstrap 4.

No matter what the changes are, what you should know is that Joomla 4 will be kind of a new product, kind of an awesome new product :)
And hopefully, Joomla 4 will bring back the popularity and attention that this incredibly poweful CMS deserves!

Now, all of us as Joomla users are very happy and very excited about the upcoming major new release, but this is quite a hard time for all Joomla companies (companies that develop templates and extensions).
It is a hard time because all companies (InspireTheme included) have to look at their products, have to do a lot of tests and changes in the code in order to make their products compatible with Joomla 4.

So, this is what this blog post is about - to announce what our plans are and what you can expect from us and our products :)

Joomla 4 is in a very early stage, many things are still to be changed, so most of the companies do not yet aim with any announcements. But without further ado, here is what we have to say:

All our products (templates and particles) will be Joomla 4 compatible and will work perfectly fine with it :)

But in order for the above statement to be true, there is one condition - the Gantry 5 framework has to be Joomla 4 compatible as well.
Don't worry, we are 99.9% sure that the Gantry 5 developers (the awesome guys at Rockettheme) will make the framework compatible with Joomla 4. There is already an opened issue on Github.

How we will distribute our products

Nothing will change about the particles - since they are dependent of the Gantry framework only (they are not dependent of the Joomla version, they are actually not dependent of the CMS at all) you will download and install them as you currently do.

About the templates - we will provide two distinct versions of all packages. We currently provide three packages for each and every template - Quickstart (Joomla 3.x), TemplateName Template (Standalone) and Gantry 5 Framework. Once Joomla 4 is released we will provide six packages for each and every template - the above three plus Quickstart (Joomla 4.x), TemplateName Template (Standalone - Joomla 4) and Gantry 5 Framework (Joomla 4).



How you will update from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4

The Joomla Team promises that it will be a one-click update for the core. The tricky part here is "for the core".
What it means is that with a click of a button you will update your Joomla from v3 to v4 but this is true for Joomla only (Articles, Menus, core Components, core Modules, core Plugins and so on). From here on, you will need to update all 3rd party extensions that you are using, including the template.
So here is what you will need to do:

  1. Update Joomla from v3 to v4
  2. Update the Gantry 5 framework (install the v4 package)
  3. Update the template (install the v4 package of the standalone template)
  4. Update all 3rd party extensions that you are using (install their v4 package)

Once you have done the above, you can refresh your page in the browser and everything should look and work perfectly fine :)

Basically, this is everything that we wanted to announce and to share with you guys.
As I said above, such major Joomla releases are quite a hard time for all Joomla companies, so you should expect delays in our template releases.
But as most of you already know, I do not really care about the quantity of our products, what I really care about is the quality of the products we provide.
I have always wanted people to think of InspireTheme as a "boutique design studio" rather than a "hypermarket that produces products on conveyor".
After all guys, you subscribe to our club because you like one or few of our existing products, not because of the unknown products that will come in the future. And our goal is to make sure that the products you subscribed for will work perfectly fine for years to come :)

Become an insider | Subscribe to our Newsletter
Subscribe to our mailing list and stay up-to-date with all our awesome releases, latest updates and amazing discount offers!