Joomla 5.4.0 released

On Tuesday, October 14, 2025, Joomla 5.4.0 was released, together with Joomla 6.0. This Joomla 5.4.0 version is meant to make the update from Joomla 5 to Joomla 6 possible. Furthermore it has one new extra feature..

New Joomla 5.4 feature: auto-updater 

Joomla administrators always needed to update their websites by hand. You had to log in to your site, check if a new version was there, and start the update yourself. From Joomla 5.4, this can now happen automatically. With a new client-server system, your website can download, install, and confirm updates by itself. So your Joomla site stays up to date without you doing anything.

Note that:

• Automatic updates only work for websites that are publicly available on the internet. If your site is behind a firewall or on a local test server, you still need to update manually
• Automatic updates work only for the "default" update channel with "Minimum Stability" set to "Stable".
• Only Joomla core updates are included. Installed extensions are not updated automatically.

While the auto-updater is a nice and clever feature, we will probably not use it on most of our websites. Even if it looks great, we prefer to keep more control over updates, just what we do on our computers with the operating systems. For example, if we would use Windows we would only allow automatic download of updates, but we would do the installation ourselves. We use Linux and there we also like to manage updates by hand.

Why we not use auto-updaters

Software sometimes behaves in strange ways. When something starts acting weird and you just did a manual update, you can connect the issue to that update and use that info to solve the problem.

Also, we like to test some parts of the system after each update. When an operating system or CMS updates itself automatically, we lose control and miss the chance to do proper testing of our own system and installed sofware or extensions.

For Joomla sites of our clients with a maintenance contract we use a software management tool that lets us manage, update, backup and monitor multiple Joomla (and WordPress) client websites including installed 3rd party extensions from a single private control panel. So no auto-updater needed there.

Upgrading to Joomla 6

The main purpose of this Joomla 5.4 version is to allow future upgrades from Joomla 5.x to Joomla 6.x. We usually upgrade a couple of our own websites to the newer version. Joomla 6 is already stable. Depending on the compatibility of the extensions used, we upgrade client websites to Joomla 6 when it's even somewhat more mature, so when it reached Joomla 6.1. 

A full list of changes can be found in the 5.4.0 milestone on GitHub.

Need help updating or migrating to Joomla 5.4? Contact us!