The Joomla! Project is pleased to announce the availability of Joomla 6.2 Release Candidate for testing.

There are two main goals for Release Candidate releases:

• Providing developers with the basis to test their extensions and reporting any issues well before the final release
• Allowing users to discover the new features introduced to Joomla 6.2.

For a complete list of known backward compatibility issues for version 6.2, please see Potential backward compatibility issues in Joomla 6.2 on the documentation site.

This release candidate version of Joomla 6.2 is not suitable for production sites. It is for testing only.

Download Joomla 6.2 Release Candidate

To always use the latest build of Joomla 6.2, we invite you to use the nightly build packages (updated every night).

To make it easier for newcomers, you can launch a free Joomla 6 website for testing at launch.joomla.org.

Joomla! 6.2 (general availability) will be released on or about 13th October 2026. The planned milestones are:

Alpha:

• Alpha 1: 26. May 2026 
• Alpha 2: 23. June 2026
• Alpha 3: 21. July 2026

Beta (Feature Freeze)

• Beta 1: 18. August 2026
• Beta 2: 01. September 2026 
• Beta 3: 15. September 2026

Release Candidate (Language Freeze)

• RC1: 29. September 2026 (this release)

Stable Release

• 13. October 2026

Please note that dates may be subject to change depending on the availability of volunteers and circumstances beyond our control.

We are firmly committed to making the next generation of Joomla the best. These are the features that have been committed to version 6.2. Since we are past the Beta stage, we have now entered Language Freeze phase.

• Language change: MariaDB/MySQL instead of MySQL
• Unit test update to PHPUnit12
• Bugfix: SQL typo in com_contact

The Joomla project is very thankful for the contributions from the following authors:

• Brian Teeman, Christian Heel & Stephan Wendhausen

As it is a release candidate, we now have a language freeze. From now on, no pull requests touching the language files will be merged unless absolutely necessary (e.g., by fixing a critical bug). We are two weeks away from a stable release, so the task is now: test, test, test.

To learn more about our development strategy, please read this article.

To help ensure the 6.2 release and our major features are “production-ready”, we need your help testing releases and reporting any bugs you may find at issues.joomla.org.

Most of all, we encourage extension developers to roll up their sleeves, seek out bugs and test their extensions with Joomla 6.2 and communicate their experience.

We encourage developers to help write the documentation about Joomla 6.2 on manual.joomla.org to help and guide users and other extension developers.

We invite you to check it regularly, update it and provide the missing content.

If you are an extension developer, please make sure you subscribe to the extension developer channel https://joomlacommunity.cloud.mattermost.com/main/channels/extension-development-room

Where you can join the community of extension developers.

• Working with the Joomla Feature Tracker
• General developer mailing list
• Joomla developer network
• Joomla and UI framework

A big thank you goes out to everyone who contributed to the release!

Your release managers: Viviana & Martin

German: Joomla! 6.2 Release Candidate – Testet die finale Version
Turkish: Joomla! 6.2 Sürüm Adayı - Nihai Paketi Test Edin