mySites.guru wins Your Favourite Tool in Your Joomla Workflow at the J!Awards 2026

mySites.guru has won Your Favourite Tool in Your Joomla Workflow in the J!Awards 2026, the first community choice awards the Joomla project has run. The winners were announced on 16 October 2026 at the Joomla World Conference in Potsdam, near Berlin, on the opening day of a conference that runs until the 18th.

Thank you to everyone who nominated and voted

This award was decided by a public vote, which is why it means so much to us. No panel picked mySites.guru. People who use it put our name forward during nominations, enough of them that we made the five-strong shortlist, and then enough people voted between 21 September and 11 October to put us first. Thank you. You took a minute out of your day to fill in a form for a tool, and we noticed.

What are the Joomla J!Awards?

The J!Awards are the Joomla project’s community choice awards, and 2026 is the first year they have run. There are eight categories in two groups, Creators and Contributors and Tools and Services, and Your Favourite Tool in Your Joomla Workflow sits in the second. Nominations ran from 17 August to 13 September, the five most-nominated entries in each category went to a public vote from 21 September to 11 October, and the most votes won. There is no jury at any stage. The Joomla press release that launched the awards names the J!OSCARs as its inspiration, which is a nice symmetry for us.

Multi-award-winning service: 5 awards

The J!OSCARs were the awards given at J and Beyond, the community Joomla conference, and the service that became mySites.guru won four of them. In 2013 at Noordwijkerhout the jury’s Joomla! Innovation of the Year went to monitoring services, mySites.guru among them. Then came Joomla Services by attendee vote three times: Königstein in 2014, Prague in 2015 and Kraków in 2017. The full awards record is on its own page.

Those four were decided at the conference, by a jury or by the people in the room. The J!Awards are the first Joomla awards where the whole community votes online, from wherever they are, so this fifth one is a different kind of result. It comes from Joomla users wherever they are, rather than the people who could make it to a conference, and we are glad to have it.

What mySites.guru does in a Joomla workflow

Picture someone who looks after forty Joomla sites for clients and opens mySites.guru with their first coffee.

The sites list comes first

Each connected site is one row: its Joomla version, its PHP version, the updates waiting and how many vulnerable extensions it is running. The sidebar narrows the list to hacked sites, end-of-life Joomla and sites with vulnerable extensions. A snapshot runs 140 or so best-practice checks on each site twice a day, so the list is current before anyone has logged in anywhere.

Updates, without forty administrator logins

Pending Joomla core and extension updates sit on one screen. Group them by extension to patch one extension on every site that has it, or by site to bring one site fully up to date. The update queue applies one update at a time on each server, so a host with twenty of your sites is not hit by all twenty together. Extensions you trust can update themselves while the rest wait for you, and core updates stay within a major version, because a move from 4 to 5 is a migration and deserves to be treated as one.

How a security problem reaches you

At each snapshot the extensions on a site are checked against hand-written vulnerability rules, and Joomla core CVEs are imported every hour from the Joomla Security Centre. The first time a site matches, the alert email goes out within seconds. In the dashboard the site is marked in the sites list, the “has vulnerable plugins” filter narrows the whole list to the sites that need patching, and the details sit on that site’s Important tab. The fix follows the same path: filter to the affected sites, press Backup All, then update that one Joomla extension across all of them. If a site was exposed for a while before you got to it, the Joomla malware scanner reads all the files on the server against roughly 1,500 patterns, a hash list of confirmed malicious files and clean core checksums for that exact Joomla version. It keeps suspect content in a separate list from confirmed hacked files, so you know which is a lead and which is a fact.

Uptime and backups, running whether you look or not

Every site gets an uptime monitor the moment it is connected. It checks every 5 minutes, makes three attempts before calling a site down, and alerts by email, the Slack app, a webhook or desktop push, with a warning before an SSL certificate expires. Backups work by driving the Akeeba Backup Professional already on each site: as many cron-style schedules per site as you need, a stalled backup resumed automatically, a daily alert naming any site without a recent backup, and the archives stored wherever you configured Akeeba, not on mySites.guru.

The jobs that used to mean one site at a time

One click opens any Joomla administrator from the dashboard with no password prompt. An extension can be installed on dozens of sites in one go. Multi-factor authentication can be forced on the Super Users of all your sites from the audit result. Team members get access to the sites you choose without seeing the Super User credentials, and white-label reports show each client what was done on their site and when. The Joomla multi-site dashboard and the full feature list have the rest.

See how it fits your own Joomla workflow

The votes came from people who use mySites.guru day in, day out. To see why they picked it, put one of your own sites through it. A free site audit runs all 280+ checks on one WordPress or Joomla site, with no card needed: install the connector, which takes about two minutes, and the full results are in the dashboard a few minutes later. If you are about to take over a site from someone else, audit it first and know what you are inheriting.

That audit opens in the same dashboard described above, and the rest of the workflow comes with the subscription: £19.99 a month for unlimited sites, all features included, unlimited team members at no extra cost, and cancelling is one click in your account. The price has not changed since 2012. If you subscribe with the code FIRSTMONTHFREE at checkout, the first 30 days cost nothing; checkout asks for a card, and cancelling before day 30 means you are not charged. The vulnerability matching, the bulk updates and the one-click fixes are all part of it.