Happy New Year!
The year 2026 has begun, and here in the snowy north, my days start with the ritual "battle against the snow." This season, we’ve had heavy snowfall, and while I now use a snowblower instead of a traditional snow sled, it’s still a grueling task. Because my property is irregularly shaped, the areas where I can pile snow are limited. The work takes two to three hours every single day, and I’m so exhausted afterward that I can’t function without another two to three hours of rest.
In the midst of this demanding winter, I have been steadily and meticulously working on updating my sites to YOOtheme Pro 5.x.
To be honest, the initial release of YOOtheme Pro 5 was quite buggy. However, I’ve been updating the sites I manage as each fix was released, and the issues were resolved one by one. The final step was waiting for third-party extensions to catch up, but now that they have updated, I can report that YOOtheme Pro 5 is running almost perfectly on Joomla 6.
I can say with absolute confidence that YOOtheme Pro 5 is much easier to use than previous versions. The speed of access has become noticeably faster, and thanks to the elimination of unnecessary caching, backup sizes have been reduced by approximately 300 to 500 MB. This is a huge relief for site management. The "Cookie Consent Manager" still has a few minor bugs, but it has been completely rebuilt and now properly supports international users.
Switching to this page builder has left me completely satisfied—so much so that I find myself wondering what all those years of struggling with previous tools were for. With those old builders, I constantly felt like I was being treated as an unpaid "beta tester" due to the endless bug fixes. Those days are finally over.
While my hands are full with snow removal right now, once things settle down, I plan to focus all my energy not only on general site management but specifically on my handicraft website.
I look forward to another great year with you all in 2026.
