The Bitter Reality of Localizing Joomla: Why I Finally Deleted My Japanese Demo Sites

The Grave of Passion — Why I Nuked My Joomla Demo Projects

There was a time when I felt like a lone pioneer in the Japanese Joomla community. Back in the Joomla 3.x era, there was a glaring void: nobody was providing localized demo sites. I took it upon myself to fill that gap. "If the developers won't show how it looks in Japanese, I will," I thought. It was a project fueled by sheer willpower and a desire to contribute.

At the time, my English skills weren't what they are today. Looking at a "premium" template filled with English dummy text made it nearly impossible to visualize a final, localized product. I spent countless late nights manually translating every string, every menu item, and every module setting for various layouts—from e-commerce setups to corporate landing pages. These sites weren't just for show; they were my "golden master" models for troubleshooting when things inevitably went wrong.

But my dedication was eventually betrayed by the very developers I had paid to support.

As Joomla evolved from 3.x to 4.x and eventually to the current 5.x, these developers—who were still happily collecting "premium" fees from new customers—utterly abandoned their responsibilities. They refused to update their templates for the new versions of the CMS. It was infuriating. How can you sell a software product while ignoring the critical need for compatibility and security? Even a casual user understands that stuck on an old version means being vulnerable to every exploit under the sun.

I came to a painful realization: for someone who isn't even a professional web developer, spending hundreds of hours on localization was a total waste of my life's energy. I was building on shifting sand. A few years ago, I reached my breaking point and wiped every single demo site from my servers.

Today, I have redirected my passion toward the world of handicrafts. It is a peaceful, honest world where effort translates directly into a tangible, lasting result—without the fear of a developer's negligence making my work obsolete overnight. I occasionally wonder about restarting a demo site, but unless I find myself with an absurd surplus of free time and literally nothing else to do, I won't be returning to that cycle of frustration.