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
Joomla 5.x on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with PHP 8.3 — Updated for 2026
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is a rock-solid long-term support platform. If you are building or rebuilding a Joomla development machine in 2026, this combination — Ubuntu 24.04, Apache 2, MySQL 8.0, and PHP 8.3 — remains the most dependable and widely supported stack you can choose. PHP 8.3 is now fully proven with Joomla 5, and the Ubuntu LTS repositories keep everything coherent and maintainable without chasing third-party PPAs. This guide walks through a clean installation from scratch, covering the full stack from a bare Ubuntu desktop to a working, SSL-secured Joomla 5 site.
What will be installed
- Apache 2, MySQL 8.0, and PHP 8.3 via the Ubuntu
lamp-servertask - Joomla 5.x — the current stable release — in one or more Apache virtual hosts
- Additional PHP modules required by Joomla 5
- ddclient for dynamic DNS updates, useful if you are working on a laptop that changes networks
- Certbot for Let's Encrypt SSL certificates
TL:DR – Installing Joomla properly forces you to think through first principles: where your databases live, how the web server is structured, whether your network topology supports Let's Encrypt's HTTP-01 challenge for certificate renewal. It is easy to lose track of the moving parts, so this guide documents every step with commands you can copy directly. Hopefully it saves someone a few hours of archaeology.
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WYSIWYG editing in Joomla 5 with Font Awesome 6
Joomla 5 ships with Font Awesome 6 and Bootstrap 5 baked in, giving you a rich palette of icons and layout utilities right out of the box. The catch is that Joomla's default editors don't render either of them in the editing pane, so you're essentially working blind until you hit publish. JCE Pro solves that with a single configuration change, turning your editor into a genuine WYSIWYG environment where icons, buttons, and Bootstrap styling all appear exactly as they will on the live site.
TL:DR – The short version: the ability to switch between code view, editor view, and a fully styled preview — seeing your articles exactly as they'll appear when published, Font Awesome icons and all — makes JCE Pro worth the subscription fee for anyone who publishes regularly.
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If you've ever dropped a Font Awesome icon into a Joomla article — something like — only to find it silently vanished after saving, you're not alone. In 2026, with Joomla 5.x now the stable release branch and Joomla 4.x in extended support, this behaviour still catches people out. The tags are being stripped by a combination of TinyMCE's own filtering and Joomla's text filter system — but the fix is straightforward once you know where to look.
Rather than spending an afternoon chasing the problem, a couple of configuration changes in the administrator panel will sort it out for good.
TL:DR –
Two settings control whether Joomla strips icon markup from your articles. Adjust the TinyMCE plugin to use Joomla's own text filter, then make sure your user group's filter level allows the tags through. Done.
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First, do you need a sitemap in 2026?
A sitemap is a file that provides structured information intended for web crawlers such as search engines. In 2026, the question of whether you actually need one is worth asking before you install anything. You might need a sitemap if your site is large, complex, or multilingual. You probably don't need one if you have a small site (Google's own guidance suggests fewer than 500 pages as a rough threshold), if your content is already comprehensively linked from menus and internal links, or if you have no video, image, or news content you specifically want surfaced in search results.
Google's crawlers have grown considerably more capable in recent years, and for straightforward Joomla sites with clean URL structures and solid internal linking, a sitemap is increasingly optional rather than essential. That said, for multilingual Joomla sites — which commonly use hreflang tags alongside sitemaps — or for larger content-heavy builds, a well-maintained XML sitemap still gives you a meaningful edge in ensuring complete and timely indexing.
TL:DR – If you do need or want a sitemap for Joomla, it remains a straightforward task. Download OSMap from Joomlashack — it is free, with a Pro tier available if you need advanced features.
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Menu Icons in Joomla
Menu icons have been a core part of the Joomla experience since version 4.1, and with Joomla 5 now firmly established as the current release, the feature is more polished and widely supported than ever. Adding icons to your navigation is one of the quickest ways to give a site a more professional, modern feel.
Icons from Bootstrap Icons, Font Awesome, or any icon font bundled with your template can be used — and with the icon ecosystem having matured considerably, you have more choice than ever.
TL:DR – Add icons to your Joomla menus in seconds, with no extensions or custom code required.
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