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
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.
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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.
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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.
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Read more: socialcards - a twitter meta data plugin for Joomla
Buttons in Joomla with Bootstrap 5.3
As of 2026, Joomla ships with Bootstrap 5.3, and its button system is one of the most practical parts of the framework to understand. Whether you are building a custom template, overriding a core layout, or crafting a module, Bootstrap's button classes give you a consistent, accessible set of interactive controls that work across forms, dialogs, toolbars, and anywhere else a user needs to take action.
TL:DR – Bootstrap, included with Joomla, is a free and open-source CSS framework aimed at helping build fast, responsive web sites.
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Module positions in the Cassiopeia template for Joomla
Cassiopeia remains the default front-end template shipped with Joomla 4 and Joomla 5, and as of 2026 it continues to be the baseline that most Joomla site builders start from before customising or switching to a child template. Understanding its module position system is foundational whether you are building a new site on Joomla 5.x or maintaining a site that migrated from an older version.
TL:DR – I keep looking for module positions in the Cassiopeia template for Joomla so I documented it.
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Read more: Module positions in the Cassiopeia template for Joomla
