Joomla in Faces. Neil Robertson (Joomla advocate)

First of all, thanks to NorrNext for this opportunity say something about me, what I do and what is happening with Joomla in Australia.

I have been a Joomla advocate since starting Webilicious in 2009 mainly building and maintaining Joomla websites including some websites built in Joomla 1.5 and migrated all the way through to Joomla 6.

I contribute to the Joomla community in various ways such as:

Since Joomla is free and open source and the foundation of my business, I am keen to give back to help ensure Joomla continues in future.

Being involved in the Joomla community is generally a rewarding experience due to the friendliness of the people which I have not necessarily found in other similar communities.

The Discord group is particularly helpful for me as I work from home on my own and the group helps me stay sane by providing support for Joomla and non-Joomla issues.

I have certainly had plenty of practice with Joomla migrations.

Finding or developing a reliable procedure for migrating the Joomla core is usually straightforward but the biggest challenge is finding replacement third party extensions for abandoned extensions that are no longer supported for various reasons. This was especially true after Joomla 3 had been around for a decade and many developers had moved on during that time making the migration from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 particularly onerous.

To simplify future migrations, I recommend doing as much as possible with the Joomla core to be less reliant on any particular third party extension. For example, data stored in custom fields (introduced with Joomla 3.7) will always be easy to migrate to future versions of Joomla and you will likely be able to find alternative extensions (e.g. Regular Labs Articles Anywhere and Regular Labs Users Anywhere) to display the data even if a particular third party extension is no longer available.

The e-commerce market continues to grow steadily in Australia with more Australians becoming comfortable with online shopping.

PayPal, Stripe and Shopify dominate online payment processing. The latest trend in online payments in Australia is BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) and younger shoppers are leading the way. Afterpay dominates the BNPL market but PayPal is catching up quickly with its own "Pay in 4" instalment product.

According to BuiltWith the top e-commerce platforms in Australia in 2025 are Shopify, Squarespace, Wix and WooCommerce.

Joomla based e-commerce solutions such as VirtueMart, HikaShop and J2Commerce (former J2Store) seem to be in decline and I can only assume this is in line with the decreased market share of Joomla.

It seems to me that Joomla is unlikely to be able to increase its market share without some commercial backing and marketing to compete with WordPress. That being said, Joomla with similar commercial backing and marketing to WordPress might not be Joomla any more!

Hopefully some middle ground can be found where Joomla can increase market share without losing it's community base and where Joomla core developers and third party extension developers can continue sustainably into the future.

There is a long list of things I appreciate about Joomla especially since occasionally building and maintaining websites on other platforms.

Some of the main features of Joomla that appeal to me are the stability, reliability and lower cost of ownership.

In my experience, it takes less time to develop a website with Joomla compared to anything else and the ongoing costs of template and extension subscriptions seems significantly less than other platforms.

Joomla has progressed rapidly with three major new versions (Joomla 4, 5 and 6) within the last four or five years but now lacks up to date documentation. This includes a lack of clear instructions for developers on how to update their extensions for new versions of Joomla.