Ezone – collected technotes, technology demonstrations, thoughts and notes from Multizone Limited, by Angus Fox

Why tech notes?

We've always written tech notes about our work for our clients. Over the years we've accumulated a great deal of hard-won knowledge, and writing it up is how we make sure it stays useful. Nothing here identifies clients or project specifics without permission, but every note is grounded in real-world experience — not sponsored content, gifted products, or AI-generated filler.

TL;DR — This is a site provided by Multizone Limited to collect technology demonstrations, thoughts and notes. It isn't full of fancy graphics or smoke and mirrors. It is ad supported. Multizone build beautiful mobile apps which benefit you or your organisation by extending your products and services, delivering effective communication, providing engagement with your stakeholders and giving your customers an opportunity to recommend you or your products and services. Multizone can help you modernise your legacy mobile apps in weeks, not months. Multizone publish a directory of extensions for the Joomla content management system (CMS), covering shared subscriptions, platform integration and supporting tools. A separate product line from the mobile services above, actively maintained since long before mobile took the headline. Multizone also provide interim or fractional  management and non-executive director level support — all while demonstrating technology leadership.

What's changed in 2026

A lot has moved on since this site was first established. Joomla has reached version 6, Flutter has matured considerably and is, dare we say, the de-facto standard cross-platform framework although opinions vary. Apple Silicon is now firmly the standard across the entire Apple range of products, and the broader conversation around AI-assisted development has changed how we approach almost every project. We've refreshed these notes to reflect where things actually stand today rather than where they were a few years ago.

We've also updated the licensing section to reflect current best practice, tidied up the typography and layout notes to reflect Joomla 6's Bootstrap 5.x foundation, and added a few observations about the development landscape as it looks heading into the second half of the 2020s.

What is on this web site?

Here you'll find opinion, information and demos — particularly about mobile app development in Flutter, Joomla content management and extension development, product management in the new era of AI, and our favourite topics of macOS, Ubuntu Linux, and a little bit of Windows. This site serves no purpose unless you are interested in those things. Please read the terms, especially the part about it being provided "AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND".

Joomla

We acknowledge and celebrate the hard work of the Joomla volunteers, who have delivered on their vision of a major new version every two years — consistently and for everyone. That cadence has continued: Joomla 5 arrived on schedule, and Joomla 6 followed in 2025. The upgrade path from Joomla 4 through to 6 has been remarkably smooth in practice.

This site was originally built on Joomla! 4. No structural changes to the site were required in order to upgrade through Joomla 5 and on to Joomla 6 — a testament to the care the Joomla team has taken with backwards compatibility. The screenshots below are kept purely for historical interest.

Joomla 6

Joomla 6 continues the modernisation work begun in Joomla 4, with a refreshed administrator capabilities, improved accessibility throughout, and tighter integration with contemporary PHP standards. The extension ecosystem has largely caught up, and the upgrade tooling has become genuinely reliable. If you are still running Joomla 4, the path to 6 is well documented and the community support is strong. All our extensions are for Joomla 6 and 6.

One practical note: Joomla 5 introduced end-of-life timelines that are shorter than previous major versions, so keeping on top of updates matters more than it used to. Joomla 6 is the current long-term supported release as of 2026.

Site theme, typography and layout

Bootstrap 5.x

This site is written for Joomla! 6, which — like Joomla 5 before it — uses Bootstrap 5, the most widely adopted open-source UI framework in the world. Bootstrap 5 dropped jQuery and Internet Explorer (remember that) as dependencies, and the resulting performance improvement was noticeable on lower-powered mobile devices.

If the text is inside the kbd tag it indicates a command-line instruction for the terminal. If the text is inside the code tag it indicates a code term inline within prose.

Cassiopeia template for Joomla and Cassiopeia Themer extension for Joomla

This site uses the default Joomla theme, Cassiopiea, augmented  by our own extension, Cassiopiea Themer, a visual control panel for the Cassiopeia template — palette, typography, layout, banners, marketing scripts. Cassiopiea Themer saves its settings in a standard CSS file which survives Joomla updates. It has a ton of useful features and perhaps you'll try it out. For this site the main ones used are: 

• Material Design 3 JSON theme imprted from Material Theme Builder to set brand, surface, and alert colours 
• Cassiopiea Themer loads optional CSS / JS bundles in every front-end page's <head>
  • Bootstrap ships with Joomla, but Bootstrap Icons do not so Cassiopiea Themer loads Bootstrap icons from the Bootstrap CDN
  • Prism.js, a syntax highlighter for code blocks in articles so Cassiopiea Themer loads it too
• Google AdSense auto-ads 
• Google Consent Mode v2
• The Inline navbar toggle puts everything on one row, with the menu items left-aligned next to the logo
• WCAG contrast testing - 10/10 pass AA

Flutter in 2026

Flutter has grown significantly since this site was first set up. What began as a promising but niche mobile framework is now a credible choice for mobile, web, and desktop targets from a single codebase. The tooling has matured, the community is large and active, and Google's investment in the framework is clear. Dart, the language underneath Flutter, has also improved substantially — null safety is now the default and expected baseline, and the language continues to gain useful features with each release.

For our work at Multizone, Flutter remains the framework of choice for cross-platform mobile development. The ability to ship to iOS and Android simultaneously, with a consistent design language and shared business logic, continues to deliver real value for our clients. We've also been watching the desktop and web targets mature — they're no longer experimental, and although we concentrate on mobile apps, for the right project they're worth serious consideration.

One area worth flagging in 2026 is AI-assisted development tooling. Tools that integrate with Flutter projects to suggest code, review logic, or generate boilerplate have become genuinely useful — not as a replacement for engineering judgement, but as a productivity layer. We treat them as we would any other tool: useful when used carefully, and worth understanding deeply before relying on them.

A few words about copyright

Copyright applies by default to creative work, which is precisely why licences matter. The open source guide from GitHub remains one of the clearest explanations of why you need an explicit licence even when your intentions are obviously open.

The full article at opensource.guide/legal/ is well worth reading in full, particularly if you are contributing to or depending on open source projects in a commercial context.

Licences we use

Licences matter whenever you publish your work, because they define what others may do with it — granting permissions, stating limitations, and setting out warranty and liability positions. The chief practical condition for most licences is simply that you display the licence text alongside your work.

If you encounter licence notices in sample code you use, leave them in place. Flutter provides a built-in LicensePage widget which surfaces the licences for all packages and plugins used in your app — a sensible default that we recommend enabling in every project as we do in ours. In a corporate setting you may need to review the licence inventory with your legal team, particularly where copyleft licences are involved.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is an international non-profit organisation that has published several copyright licences, free of charge, covering a range of permissions from attribution-only through to full share-alike requirements. Where we publish written content or assets that aren't code, Creative Commons licences are often the most appropriate choice.

Permissive licence and copyright — BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" Licence

Original code for mobile apps published on ezone.co.uk by Angus Fox, Multizone Limited is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" Licence — the same licence used by the Flutter Authors. This is a permissive licence that allows broad reuse, with a clause that prohibits others from using the name of the project or its contributors to promote derived products without written consent. It is a pragmatic choice for framework and library code intended for wide adoption.

Free software — GNU General Public Licence v3.0

Original code for Joomla! published on ezone.co.uk by Angus Fox, Multizone Limited is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence v3.0 (GPL-3.0) — https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html. The GPL carries a strong copyleft requirement: when you distribute derived works, the source code must be made available under the same licence. This aligns with Joomla's own licensing, which has been GPL since the project's earliest days, and reflects the spirit of the broader free software movement.