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
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).
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Read more: From Start to Finish: How to Submit to Joomla Extension Directory Effectively
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.
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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.
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If you're dealing with the "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" flag in Google Search Console, you're in good company — it remains one of the most persistent indexing headaches for Joomla site owners heading into 2026. Google's approach to canonicalisation has grown more assertive over the past few years: the search engine increasingly treats canonical tags as hints rather than directives, meaning a poorly configured site can find Google routinely overriding its stated preferences. This guide breaks down why that happens, how to diagnose it inside a Joomla environment, and what concrete steps you can take to reclaim control over which URLs get indexed.
The knock-on effects are real. When Google consistently favours a URL you didn't intend, link equity fragments across duplicates, organic rankings soften, and traffic can erode quietly over weeks before you notice. The good news is that the problem is almost always fixable — it just requires aligning every technical signal on your site, not only the canonical tag itself.
TL:DR – The "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" status means Google has decided another URL better represents your content. Fixing it requires more than editing a single tag; you need to ensure your canonical declarations, internal links, sitemaps, and redirect logic all point in the same direction. This article shows you how to do that inside Joomla.
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Read more: Better SEO in Joomla by eliminating duplicate canonicals
Efficient asset management is a cornerstone of modern web development, and in 2026 Joomla's Web Asset Manager remains one of the framework's most powerful — and underused — features. Controlled through joomla.asset.json, it gives developers a structured, declarative way to manage CSS and JavaScript dependencies without scattering manual includes across templates and extensions. With Joomla 5.x now the active long-term support branch and Joomla 6 on the horizon, understanding the Web Asset Manager is no longer optional for serious Joomla development — it is the expected approach.
TL:DR – Joomla's Web Asset Manager handles stylesheets and scripts through a single, version-controlled JSON file. Instead of manually injecting assets in PHP templates, you declare them in joomla.asset.json, define their dependencies, and let Joomla resolve load order, versioning, and deduplication automatically.
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Read more: Using Joomla Web Asset Manager - joomla.asset.json
