Joomla® — The Flexible Platform Empowering Website Creators
Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications.
Multizone have been building websites and content management solutions with Joomla since its inception in 2005 and love it. it may not have the market share of some of the competition, but it is award-winning, free and open-source.
Joomla! has a global community of developers and volunteers, who make sure the platform is user friendly, extendable, multilingual, accessible, responsive, search engine optimized and more.
How to get started with Joomla!
Joomla! is free, open, and available to anyone under the GPL. If you are unfamiliar with this license, you might want to read the GNU General Public License FAQ. Read Getting Started with Joomla! to find out the basics.
If you're ready to install Joomla! by yourself ou can download the latest version of Joomla! and you'll be up and running in no time.
Joomla tech notes and demos
Setting up an Apache server with Homebrew on macOS Sequoia 15 remains one of the cleanest ways to build a local Joomla development environment in 2026. This guide walks you through installing Apache, PHP, and MariaDB via Homebrew, making the configuration adjustments needed, and getting Joomla running locally. Critically, this approach leaves the system version of Apache — which Apple has made increasingly awkward to work with — completely untouched. If you haven't yet installed Homebrew, do that first; it's the foundation everything else here builds on.
TL:DR – Installing Apache on macOS with Homebrew is straightforward: edit a few configuration files, set permissions, install PHP and MariaDB, then drop in Joomla. This is a local development setup, ideal for building and testing Joomla extensions and sites before pushing to a hosting provider. Production hosting on a Mac is not something I'd recommend — a managed host handles that far better.
- Details
Joomla remains one of the most capable and widely used content management systems available in 2026, and its default front-end template — Cassiopeia — ships with both Joomla 5 and the recently released Joomla 6. Clean, responsive, and built on modern CSS, Cassiopeia is an excellent starting point. But a starting point is all it is. Most site owners need colours, typography, and layout that reflect their own brand rather than Joomla's defaults. The challenge has always been doing that in a way that survives the next update — and in 2026 there are better tools than ever to make that happen. This article walks through every approach, from hand-rolled CSS overrides to dedicated visual control panels like Cassiopeia Themer, so you can choose the method that suits your workflow.
TL:DR – Customising Cassiopeia's colour theme without losing your work on the next Joomla update takes a deliberate strategy: child-theme overrides, a dedicated user.css file, or a purpose-built extension such as Cassiopeia Themer. Each approach is covered below.
- Details
Read more: Custom themes for the Cassiopeia template in Joomla
Submitting an extension to the Joomla! Extension Directory™ (JED) remains one of the most effective ways for developers to reach the wider Joomla community. As of 2026, the directory continues to grow, hosting thousands of extensions across every category imaginable. The submission process has matured alongside Joomla itself — with Joomla 5 now the current stable release and Joomla 4 still widely deployed — meaning the bar for quality, security, and compatibility is higher than ever. This guide walks you through the full process, from registration to post-submission promotion, drawing on direct experience submitting the Automatic Meta Description plugin.
TL:DR – Submitting to the JED means registering on the platform, running JED Checker (now at v2.4.2 and fully Joomla 4/5/6 compatible) against your package, completing the submission form carefully, and waiting for the review team to approve your listing. You can find the plugin in the JED by searching for Automatic Meta Description (Joomla Extensions Directory), and the source code is on GitHub at Autometa (GitHub).
- Details
Read more: From Start to Finish: How to Submit to Joomla Extension
In 2026, the question of how to reach and grow an audience has never been more pressing — or more crowded with competing answers. Newsletter platforms have matured into serious publishing tools, while traditional CMS platforms like Joomla continue to evolve. For creators weighing a dedicated newsletter service like Buttondown against a full-featured blogging platform, the decision is less about which is "better" in the abstract and more about which fits your actual workflow, goals, and audience. This article cuts through the noise to give you a clear, current picture of both options.
TL:DR – Buttondown is a lean, privacy-respecting newsletter platform that suits writers who want to focus on email-first publishing with minimal overhead. Joomla is a powerful, extensible CMS that rewards creators who need a full publishing ecosystem — but demands more setup and ongoing maintenance. Neither is universally superior; the right choice depends on what you're building and how you want to build it.
- Details
Joomla remains a widely-used open-source CMS, and its extension ecosystem is as active as ever. If you're building plugins for Joomla 5.x and later, getting your head around the full publication pipeline — from local development through to the Joomla Extensions Directory takes some effort. This article walks through how I automated the release of my own Joomla plugin, covering the build script, the update server setup, and the submission process, so you don't have to piece it all together from scratch.
TL:DR – There's a lot to learn the first time, but once the update server pipeline is in place it becomes straightforward and repeatable. The plugin is live: Automatic Meta Description in the Joomla! Extensions Directory.
- Details
