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
Roboto has evolved well beyond its origins as Android's system font to become one of the most widely deployed typefaces on the web. Now in 2026, it remains a cornerstone of Google's design ecosystem and, crucially for Joomla developers, it is the only locally bundled font shipped with a standard Joomla installation — located in the directory /media/vendor/roboto-fontface. Template creators should treat this directory as read-only, since it is managed by Joomla core updates and any customisations made there will be overwritten.
For a full overview of the family and its available styles, visit the Google Fonts page for Roboto.
TL:DR – Roboto is a versatile, open-source typeface designed by Google, available in a wide range of styles and weights. It ships with every Joomla installation, making it a practical first choice for Joomla template designers. Its variable font edition, Roboto Flex, now offers fine-grained typographic control suited to modern responsive design.
- Details
Web apps are rarely the best tool for repetitive tasks that demand consistency. Command-line interfaces cut through the overhead, and Joomla's CLI — mature and capable as of Joomla 5 — lets you script, automate, and execute routine operations with precision. Whether you're managing a single site or maintaining a fleet of them, the CLI is one of the most underused tools available to Joomla administrators in 2026.
Connecting via SSH and setting a configuration option from the terminal might feel unusual at first, but it's no different in terms of security from using a file editor over the same connection. Once it clicks, you'll wonder how you managed without it.
TL:DR – Joomla's CLI is powerful, scriptable, and well-suited to modern DevOps workflows. A handful of commands covers everything from cache cleaning and user management to scheduled task automation and live updates. It works anywhere you can SSH in — macOS Terminal, Linux shell, or Windows via WSL2.
- Details
Running Joomla on Ubuntu in 2026: What's Changed and What Still Applies
If you're setting up or maintaining a Joomla server on Ubuntu in 2026, the landscape has shifted considerably since the early 4.x days. Joomla 6.x is now the current stable branch, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the recommended long-term support release, and PHP 8.3 is the version you should be targeting. That said, the core workflow for getting Joomla running on a local Ubuntu LAMP stack remains recognisable — it's mostly a matter of knowing which version numbers to substitute and which old assumptions to discard.
TL:DR – The notes below were originally written when Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipped with PHP 8.1 by default and Joomla 4.1.3 was the current release. That combination caused some friction for anyone upgrading from an older setup — white screens, missing PHP extensions, and a Joomla version that predated PHP 8.1 support. The troubleshooting logic is still sound, so rather than discard it, this article has been updated to reflect where things stand now.
- Details
RSS has outlasted every prediction of its death. In 2026, this straightforward syndication format remains one of the most reliable ways to pull fresh, structured content from external sources directly into your Joomla site — no third-party integrations, no API keys, no subscription fees. If you want automatically updated news on your site without the overhead, RSS feeds in Joomla are still the right tool for the job.
RSS feeds in Joomla: still relevant in 2026
Despite the rise of social media aggregators and headless content APIs, RSS has quietly held its ground. Major news publishers, podcasting platforms, government data portals, and developer blogs continue to publish RSS and Atom feeds as a matter of course. Joomla's built-in News Feeds component — carried forward and refined through Joomla 4 and into Joomla 5 — makes consuming those feeds straightforward. You register a feed URL, attach it to a menu item, and Joomla handles the rest, refreshing the content automatically within your site's existing template and design.
TL:DR – Joomla 6 the current release as of 2026, retains full compatibility with the News Feeds workflow described here. If you migrated from Joomla 4, or 5 your existing feeds migrate cleanly. The administrator interface has been refined with a cleaner Atum-based backend, but the steps are essentially the same. Everything below applies to both Joomla 4 and Joomla 5 unless noted otherwise.
- Details
Twitter — now rebranded as X — has changed beyond recognition since this plugin was first written. The platform's card system still technically exists, but the open web has largely moved on to the Open Graph protocol, which is supported by X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, and virtually every other platform that renders link previews. If you're building or maintaining a Joomla 5 site in 2026 and want rich link previews wherever your content gets shared, Open Graph meta tags are the right tool. This article documents the original Twitter Cards plugin as a worked Joomla plugin example — the code and concepts remain instructive — but the practical recommendation at the end has changed.
twitter: meta tags, but Open Graph tags are now the standard approach and are supported by X as a fallback. See the TL;DR below.TL:DR – The Twitter Card meta tag format predated the Open Graph protocol and has since been largely superseded by it. X will read og: tags if twitter: tags are absent, so a single set of Open Graph tags now covers X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and most other platforms simultaneously. I wrote about how to provide that functionality in Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons for Joomla, which handles Open Graph tags cleanly and is what I now use in place of socialcards.
- Details
Read more: socialcards - a twitter meta data plugin for Joomla