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
In 2026, automated release pipelines are no longer a luxury reserved for large engineering teams — they are the baseline expectation for any serious software project. Yet a surprising number of Joomla extension developers are still shipping releases by hand, copying files over SSH, and hoping nothing was missed. This article documents how we migrated our own Joomla extension build process from manual local builds to a fully automated, Git-based release pipeline — and why, in today's environment, that shift is more important than ever.
TL:DR – Moving from a manual, error-prone release process to a robust automated pipeline takes real effort upfront, but the payoff is immediate: faster releases, fewer mistakes, and a professional workflow that scales as your extension portfolio grows.
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Read more: From Local Builds to Production DevOps: Automating Joomla Extension Release Management
If you're a Joomla extension developer in 2026, debugging PHP can still feel like navigating a maze — but the tools available today make it far more manageable than they once did. Xdebug remains the gold standard for PHP debugging, and with Joomla running on PHP 8.3 and 8.4 across most modern stacks, getting Xdebug properly configured on macOS via Homebrew is a skill worth having. This guide walks you through a current, working setup: from installation through to live breakpoint debugging in your IDE of choice.
TL:DR – Set up Xdebug 3.4+ on macOS via Homebrew to streamline your Joomla development. Ensure you have Homebrew and PHP 8.3 or 8.4 ready, install Xdebug via PECL, configure a dedicated xdebug.ini, and integrate with VSCodium or VS Code. The result is a clean, step-through debugging experience that replaces guesswork with clarity.
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Read more: Mastering Xdebug PHP debugging for Joomla on macOS Homebrew
In 2026, running Joomla on Amazon Lightsail remains one of the most practical entry points into cloud hosting for developers, agencies, and organisations that want genuine AWS infrastructure without the overhead of configuring EC2, VPCs, and load balancers from scratch. Lightsail has matured considerably since its launch, and Joomla itself has continued to evolve — meaning the combination is more capable today than ever. This article covers everything you need to deploy, secure, and manage a Joomla site on Lightsail in 2026: current pricing tiers, architecture considerations, security best practices, AWS service integrations, and what has changed recently that you need to know about.
TL:DR – Lightsail gives you a predictable monthly bill, a one-click Joomla blueprint, and a clear upgrade path into the wider AWS ecosystem. This guide walks through setup, security hardening, performance optimisation, and the latest platform changes so you can make an informed hosting decision today.
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Setting up an Apache server with Homebrew on macOS Sequoia 15 remains one of the cleanest ways to build a local Joomla development environment in 2026. This guide walks you through installing Apache, PHP, and MariaDB via Homebrew, making the configuration adjustments needed, and getting Joomla running locally. Critically, this approach leaves the system version of Apache — which Apple has made increasingly awkward to work with — completely untouched. If you haven't yet installed Homebrew, do that first; it's the foundation everything else here builds on.
TL:DR – Installing Apache on macOS with Homebrew is straightforward: edit a few configuration files, set permissions, install PHP and MariaDB, then drop in Joomla. This is a local development setup, ideal for building and testing Joomla extensions and sites before pushing to a hosting provider. Production hosting on a Mac is not something I'd recommend — a managed host handles that far better.
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Joomla remains one of the most capable and widely used content management systems available in 2026, and its default front-end template — Cassiopeia — ships with both Joomla 5 and the recently released Joomla 6. Clean, responsive, and built on modern CSS, Cassiopeia is an excellent starting point. But a starting point is all it is. Most site owners need colours, typography, and layout that reflect their own brand rather than Joomla's defaults. The challenge has always been doing that in a way that survives the next update — and in 2026 there are better tools than ever to make that happen. This article walks through every approach, from hand-rolled CSS overrides to dedicated visual control panels like Cassiopeia Themer, so you can choose the method that suits your workflow.
TL:DR – Customising Cassiopeia's colour theme without losing your work on the next Joomla update takes a deliberate strategy: child-theme overrides, a dedicated user.css file, or a purpose-built extension such as Cassiopeia Themer. Each approach is covered below.
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Read more: Custom themes for the Cassiopeia template in Joomla
