Support

We will continue providing security updates until August 17th, 2024 as we had already announced months ago at the top of the Downloads page. Access to these security updates follows the same rule as any version of our software: you can access the Core versions without a user account, you can access the Professional versions only with an active subscription to the product.

We will stop providing general support to Joomla 3 users starting August 17th, 2023, as we had announced two years ago.

However, as you said, there are people who have still not migrated to Joomla 4 (or away from Joomla). For these use cases, we are going to be announcing a new J3 Extended Support add-on subscription which will be a non-refundable, flat fee of 60 Euros plus VAT / sales tax if applicable. Having both the J3 Extended Support subscription and a product subscription will allow you to receive limited support for the Joomla 3 version of the corresponding software until August 17th, 2024.

“Limited support” means that we are going to give support using and troubleshooting the software, but it does not cover bug fixes, adding / removing / changing existing features, addressing changes in third party services (e.g. third party cloud storage providers), or introducing support for new PHP / MySQL / Apache / browser versions. We will only offer this Limited Support to people using Joomla 3.10 on PHP versions 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1 using the latest released versions of our Joomla 3 software.

I am working on the implementation for that and will be doing the official announcement next week.

As for Joomla! 4, please remember that in October 2023 Joomla will be releasing Joomla 4.4 Long Term Support (one year active maintenance, one year security fixes only) and Joomla 5.0 (regular release, six months of active support, zero support after that). Our software will support both Joomla 4 and 5 until October 2024 — one year. Afterwards, we will only be providing security updates for Joomla 4.4. We expect most people will migrate to Joomla 5 without a problem within the first year. After all, Joomla 5.0 really is Joomla 4.5 under a different name. The amount of migration effort is directly comparable to Joomla 3.3 to 3.4 and 3.6 to 3.7 — if you remember, these were the updates which caused minor issues and required minor updates in third party software and templates. If you see any third party extension not having a Joomla 5 compatible version by August 2024, stop using it; they had stopped updating their code for so long in the past decade that they'll never be able to realistically catch up with new Joomla! versions.

As for support for Joomla 4.4 beyond October 2024… ask me next year. Between the very short major release cadence of Joomla, the LTS overlapping the previous major version, and the possibility of an ELTS for another year and half after that this is a completely new landscape which drastically differs from the first 15 years of Joomla!, and is even a big departure from the last two years of Joomla! when the overlapping major versions were introduced. I don't have enough data points to understand what makes economic sense at this point in time. Something's gotta give. Whether it will be dropping all support for old Joomla versions, not adding support for new Joomla versions until much later in their release cycle (e.g. their x.2 release), or an increase in your cost if you use an old Joomla version is yet to be determined. What I do know is that it is impossible to do active support for two Joomla versions at the same time, and/or offer security updates and limited support for an even older one using the current subscription structure and prices. The math simply doesn't add up.