Some news about Joomla 4 and WordPress 5

[Alejandro]

Hi,

As you may, or may not, have heard, the official release of WordPress 5 is now imminent with a target day of tomorrow Dec. 6th. You can read more about this on the WordPress 5 Target Date blog post. Not everyone is happy with the timing of the release. Yoast, one of the most popular WordPress plugin developers, published a blog post related to this Should you update to WordPress 5.0? 

With regards to JReviews, the release also came as a surprise because I had been reading in the past few days that many in the community preferred an early 2019 release to give everyone enough time to prepare, rather than doing it so close to the holidays. I personally have not had any time to do through testing with JReviews and WordPress 5, but the results of my very limited testing indicate that there don't appear to be any major issues between JReviews 3.5 and WordPress 5. However, I do recommend that you wait to update until after any initial issues within WordPress 5 itself are ironed out. It would be helpful if you update for testing purposes on a development site and report any issues with JReviews. JReviews will not be able to support the use of the new Gutenberg editor for the time being as this would require a complete overhaul of the code. You can still use Gutenberg for core posts and pages, and JReviews will continue to use the classic editor.

Moving on to Joomla. While Joomla 4 is still in Alpha, the amount of breaking changes to existing extensions when upgrading from Joomla 3 is quite substantial! I wasn't even able to install JReviews 3.5 on my first try. However, in preparation for future compatibility with Joomla 4, whenever the stable version is released, I've already dedicated a considerable amount of time refactoring the code to the point where JReviews 3.5 now works on Joomla 4 Alpha 6, while also remaining backwards compatible with Joomla 3.9. Maybe also Joomla 3.8 and a few others below, which I haven't tested because we all need to move forward. The next update of JReviews 3.5 will already incorporate some of these changes so you can also get started with testing JReviews on Joomla 4.

That's all for now. I am still working on a few tasks before releasing the next update. And now that these platform issues and concerns can be put aside for the time being, there's more time to dedicate to more interesting developments!

All the best,

Alejandro