Joomla Day of Code: A Non-Coder's Perspective

Joomla's Day of Code event presented by Laura Gordon, Olivier Buisard and Robin Clapp at Rutgers University on August 27, 2026 highlighted new low‑code workflows and AI‑assisted content generation tools built into Joomla 4.5, signaling that Joomla sites will soon see increased automated traffic from AI‑driven editors and testing bots. For website owners this means a surge of AI‑generated page requests, especially when clients adopt the new “Smart Content Blocks” that auto‑populate articles using language models. Those bots can inflate traffic metrics, skew SEO data, and potentially trigger security alerts if not properly identified. Moreover, the AI‑assisted publishing feature respects the llms.txt standard, requiring sites to declare permissible bot behaviors to avoid unintended crawling or content scraping. **Actionable tips:** 1. Update your llms.txt file to include a “Joomla‑AI‑Bot” entry with the path /ai‑editor/* and set crawl‑delay to 5 seconds, ensuring the new Joomla AI editors are recognized and throttled. 2. Deploy a bot‑tracking rule in your analytics platform to flag any user‑agent containing “Joomla‑AI” and segment that traffic for separate reporting. 3. Enable server‑side rate limiting (e.g., mod_evasive or Cloudflare Rate Limiting) specifically for the /ai‑editor/* endpoint to protect against accidental overload during peak AI content generation sessions.