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
Take precise control of your Joomla 6 site's design by creating layout overrides — without ever touching core files.
Joomla remains one of the most capable open-source content management systems available in 2026. Web agencies, enterprises, online shops, bloggers, community organisations, NGOs, schools, charities, and governments all rely on it as their CMS of choice. Its longevity is no accident: Joomla is built by the people who use it every day, which shows in its security track record, robust architecture, and thoughtful developer experience.
One of Joomla's most powerful — and often underused — features is its override system. A layout override lets you customise the output of templates and extensions without modifying core files. That means when Joomla 6 pushes an update, or an extension developer ships a new release, your customisations survive intact. No patching, no re-applying changes, no breakage.
TL:DR – This article walks through the step-by-step process of creating a layout override in Joomla 6 and explains how it gives developers full, maintainable control over a site's design. One important distinction before we start: this is about layout overrides, not template overrides. They are related but different things, and conflating the two is a common source of confusion.
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Read more: Creating a layout override (alternative layout) in Joomla
Generating a clean, functional table of contents in Joomla has historically been more painful than it should be. After a previous plugin let me down one too many times, I went looking for something better — and found a solution that works reliably in Joomla 5 and Joomla 6. It took a little customisation, but the end result is exactly what I wanted: a compact, styled Bootstrap card sitting neatly above the article content.
TL:DR – Credit to Clifford E Ford, who wrote the original example plugin and documented it on the Joomla developer docs site.
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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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