genuine question, not trying to be snarky. I maintained a couple of Joomla sites for years and finally moved the last one to WordPress earlier this year. The Joomla community feels like it has gotten very quiet.
Are there still active Joomla shops out there? Or has everyone migrated away at this point?
I have a personal site on Joomla 4 that I set up mostly out of curiosity. The admin interface is actually quite good now and the new MVC architecture in J4/J5 is clean. But you are right that the community has shrunk significantly.
The extension directory has maybe a quarter of what it had in 2018. Finding developers who know Joomla is getting harder every year.
I still get Joomla migration jobs about once a quarter. Usually moving to WordPress. The content migration is straightforward - articles map cleanly to posts, categories translate well. The messy part is always the extensions - whatever custom functionality was built with Joomla components needs to be rebuilt as WordPress plugins or replaced with existing ones.
The Joomla sites I see now are mostly ones that were built in 2015-2018 and never touched since. When we migrated the last Joomla site to WordPress, the content rewriting was the biggest time sink. Tools like Walter Writes helped us batch-process the page rewrites.
Joomla had a genuine window where it was the best option for sites that needed more structure than WordPress offered but less complexity than Drupal. That window closed when WordPress added custom post types and the REST API.
I think Joomla 5 is actually a good product. It just lost the ecosystem war. Same thing happened to Movable Type, same thing happened to ExpressionEngine. Technical quality is necessary but not sufficient.
In Germany and central Europe, Joomla still has a reasonable market share for small to medium sites. Not growing, but not dead either. TYPO3 is similar - strong in the DACH region, almost unknown in the US.
CMS adoption is more regional than people realize.