This is the first Cybersalt release of Impulsa, and it is a substantial one. The template has been rebuilt to run natively on Joomla 5 — the original was built for Joomla 3 and carried a decade of dependencies that Joomla no longer ships. Alongside that, this release folds in every fix found across our template range since Impulsa was last touched, plus a full page-by-page review of the design against the demo site.

It ships against Joomla 5.4.8 with VirtueMart 4.8.0.

Joomla 5 compatibility

• The template is now Joomla 5 native. The layout has been migrated from Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 5, which is the framework Joomla 5 itself uses. This is the change that makes everything else on this list possible.
• Internet Explorer support code has been removed — the conditional blocks and the three compatibility libraries (selectivizr, modernizr and html5shiv) that existed only to prop up browsers that no longer exist.
• The abandoned jQuery plug-ins have been retired and replaced with equivalent built-in behaviour. The Superfish and Supersubs menu plug-ins, the Backstretch background-image plug-in and a browser-detection patch for a jQuery version from 2013 were all removed. Menu hover behaviour and full-page backgrounds now work without them, and behave the same way.
• Every on/off setting in the template options now uses Joomla 5's own switch control. 84 settings were still drawn with Joomla 3 markup, which rendered as a plain checkbox or, in places, as nothing at all.
• Pop-up windows now use Joomla 5's own dialog system. The login pop-up and the product pop-ups were built on the Bootstrap 2 modal, which Joomla 5 does not load.
• Fixed a fatal error on the login form. The VirtueMart login used a Joomla 3 form-validation call that was removed in Joomla 5, producing a 500 error page instead of a login form. With thanks to Zoltán, who reported this.
• Fixed a fatal error on the address-edit screen under PHP 8, where a change in how PHP counts values could stop the page loading. With thanks to Zoltán Szász, who reported this.

The print view, pop-ups and the error page

• The print view and the error page had never been modernized. Every improvement made to this template previously had only ever been applied to the main page layout. The print view — which is also what VirtueMart uses for “ask a question” and similar pop-ups — and the error page every visitor sees on a broken link were both still loading the original Bootstrap 2 stylesheets. Both now use the same Bootstrap 5 foundation as the rest of the template.
• Removed stylesheet requests for files that are no longer part of the template. Each one returned the site's “page not found” response on every single page load, wasting a request and logging a browser warning each time.

The slideshow

• The home-page slideshow has been rebuilt on Swiper 11. It previously ran on camera.js, an abandoned jQuery plug-in.
• Your existing slideshow settings still apply. Transition speed, auto-advance and its delay, pagination and the previous/next arrows are all read from the settings you already have, so a site that had them configured keeps the same behaviour.
• The slideshow library is now bundled with the template rather than fetched from an outside content network. A template you have installed should not stop working because someone else's server is down.
• Fixed the hero banner rendering with no height and no images.
• Fixed the slideshow caption, which was missing its description line and its SHOP NOW button, and restored the hero band to its full height.

One deliberate difference to note: the old slideshow sized the hero from each image's own proportions. Swiper sizes it from the slideshow height in your template settings. If those differ, the hero is now the height you configured.

Product listings and layout

• Fixed the product tabs all rendering at once. The Best Deals, Hot Offer, New Items and Great Sale panes were stacking into one long single-column list instead of showing one pane at a time.
• Fixed a stray bullet point beside every product tile in the product grids.
• Fixed product tiles being slightly too narrow, which stopped a row of four from filling the width it was given.
• Fixed product rows collapsing to a few pixels tall, which let the content below overlap the products.
• Fixed the Best Deals grid laying out unevenly instead of a clean four-by-two.
• Fixed the testimonials block, which rendered as two broken half-width boxes instead of one full-width band.
• Fixed articles being clipped to just their title in the featured-articles view.
• Fixed the pagination arrows rendering as empty squares.

Mobile

• The mobile header has been rebuilt. The menu is now a hamburger opening a tinted drawer, with a single-branch accordion for sub-menus.
• Fixed a large empty white band above the page on phones. The header was reserving space for itself twice over.
• Fixed the menu button sitting off-centre beside the logo, and guaranteed it contrasts with the bar behind it — on some settings it was drawing white on white and was invisible.
• Fixed a duplicate submit button in the mobile search panel.
• The cart is now a proper control in the mobile toolbar rather than a stray icon bar of its own.
• Fixed an empty band under the logo row where the desktop navigation used to sit.
• Fixed the close button on pop-ups being drawn underneath the pop-up content.

Desktop layout

• Fixed the search-for-products button being cut off by a header row that was too short for it.
• Fixed the header icons being uneven in size and not sitting on a common midline.
• The back-to-top button is now a circle with its arrow properly centred instead of a lopsided oval.
• Fixed promotional modules appearing above the form on account pages, pushing the actual form far down the page. On a phone the form began roughly two thousand pixels down; it now sits at the top where it belongs.

Icons, fonts and social links

• Icons have been brought up to Font Awesome 6. The template previously loaded two different older versions at once, and the compatibility mapping is included so existing icon settings keep working.
• Fixed a missing icon font in the editor and search box. It pointed at a Joomla 3 location that Joomla 4 removed, so it returned four errors per page load and drew a stray character in place of the search icon.
• The social links have been brought up to date. Added Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok and Discord. Removed Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg and Blogger, which no longer exist or no longer offer sharing. Twitter is now labelled X. The icons are now scalable glyphs rather than a fixed-size image strip.

The template Options screen

• The colour settings are real colour pickers again. All 21 colour settings rendered as empty text boxes under Joomla 5, so changing a colour meant knowing and typing its hex code exactly. The Joomla 3 colour library they depended on never loaded under Joomla 5; it has been replaced with a picker that ships inside the template, so nothing is fetched from an outside site.
• Fixed a JavaScript error on the Options screen that appeared as jQuery is not defined.
• Fixed the Details panel being unreadable in Joomla's dark admin theme. It shipped a fixed light treatment — grey text with a white shadow — which on a dark background was legible only by accident. It now follows whichever admin theme you have selected.
• Fixed the icons on the Options screen failing to load. They came from a content delivery network that has since shut down.
• Fixed Joomla 5.4's “What's New” tour taking over the first admin visit, which sent every administrator link to the dashboard instead of where you clicked. The tour still exists and still works — it just no longer starts by itself.

Housekeeping and security

• Template settings are now escaped on output throughout the template, so a value entered in the template options cannot break the page or be used to inject markup.
• Added a show/hide control to every password field on the login, registration and account forms.
• Style changes now reach visitors immediately after an update. The stylesheets carried no version marker, so browsers kept serving the previously cached copy until the visitor cleared their cache by hand.
• Fixed a fragment of code printing as visible text on the page.
• Fixed the search button detaching from the search box.
• Fixed three template settings pointing at a background image that has never shipped with the template, which requested a missing file on every page load. Clearing them changes nothing visually, because an image that fails to load never drew anything.
• Removed an internal development report file that was being included in the download.
• Removed three unused leftover templates and a set of dormant payment plug-ins that were bundled but never enabled.
• The copyright year in the footer module now reads 2026.

With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose bug report led to the maintenance pass that produced several of the fixes above.