Inspire Virtuemart Template Changelog

Updated 29 October 2026 · in Template Change Log

• Change Log:
  • Release Date: 2026-10-29, Version: 5.4.10.1, Notes:

    “Ask a question” opens at its proper size again. The pop-up for asking about a product — and VirtueMart’s other window-style pop-ups — opened as a tiny 300 × 150 box, the size a browser gives a frame that has none of its own, because a rule written for the “added to your cart” pop-up also reset theirs. They now open at VirtueMart’s 560 × 550 (narrower on phones), centred on the screen, and the question form fits: “Name” and “E-Mail” stay on one line with their colon, the fields sit inside the pop-up, and the Send button no longer overlaps the character count.

    The “added to your cart” pop-up fits small phones. On screens narrower than about 340 pixels its two buttons ran past the right-hand edge of the white box. The box now sizes itself to the screen there, with the buttons inside it.

    The print view and VirtueMart’s pop-ups use the template’s colours. In the print view and the cart and login pop-ups, links and buttons showed in Bootstrap’s default blue: component.php loaded Bootstrap after the template’s own stylesheets, so Bootstrap’s link colour won. It now loads first, exactly as it does on every full page, and the template’s accent colour is defined for these views too.

    The My Account pop-up no longer scrolls inside itself. Its box was capped at 350 pixels — a limit from the Joomla 3 version of the form — which is a few pixels shorter than the Joomla 5 login form, so the last link sat under a scrollbar. The box now fits the whole form.

    Ten Options settings that changed nothing removed. The slideshow-loader colours (cam_loaderColor, cam_loaderBgColor) belonged to the old Camera slideshow script, which the template no longer uses. Eight more were declared in the Options screen but read by no code, so changing them did nothing: CameraABG, CameraABGHover, cameracommands, categorytitleBG, prspacerbr1, prspacerbr2, searchPositionButtonHBg and topmenuAlinksBG.

    28 files that nothing loaded removed from the download. 26 JavaScript files (bootstrap.min.js, camera.js, camera.min.js, dropkick.js, flexibility.js, imgSizer.js, iscroll.js, jquery-1.8.1.min.js, jquery.backstretch.min.js, jquery.dropkick-1.0.0.js, jquery.easing.1.3.js, jquery.equalHeights.js, jquery-eu-cookie-law-popup.js, jquery.mobile.customized.min.js, jquery.nicescroll.min.js, jquery.noConflict.js, jquery.plusanchor.js, jquery.selectric.js, jquery.stellar.min.js, modernizr.js, owl.carousel.min.js, scrollReveal.min.js, selectivizr-min.js, slick.min.js, superfish.js, supersubs.js) and 2 stylesheets (reset.css, slideshow.css). No page, pop-up or view of the template loads any of them; they only added weight to every download.

  • Release Date: 2026-10-27, Version: 5.4.10, Notes:
    First Joomla 5 native release. Inspire has been rebuilt for Joomla 5.4.10 + VirtueMart 4.8.4 + PHP 8.3 + Bootstrap 5 + vanilla JavaScript. The Bootstrap 2 framework, the Joomla 3 class aliases and the jQuery plugin stack the previous release depended on are gone. Measured against the previous download: 23 files removed, 15 added and 61 modified, with 190 Joomla 3 static calls reduced to 0 and 218 output-escaping helper calls added.

    Added

    Template Options — colour pickers and a Favicon tool

    • All 84 colour settings now use a real colour picker with a live swatch. On Joomla 5 every one of them rendered as an empty text box, so changing a colour meant knowing its hex code and typing it correctly. The Joomla 3-era jscolor library they relied on never loaded under Joomla 5; it has been retired for a self-contained picker that ships with the template, so nothing is fetched from an outside site.
    • New Favicon tab. Upload or pick an image and the template crops it and generates the icon set for you, rather than leaving you to produce an .ico by hand. With thanks to Gianluca, whose favicon question inspired this tool.
    • The template's Details panel now follows whichever admin theme you have selected. It shipped a hardcoded light treatment — grey text with a white shadow — which on Joomla's dark admin was legible only by accident.

    Modern slideshow — Swiper 11

    • The home-page slideshow has been migrated from the discontinued camera.js to Swiper 11, which is bundled with the template rather than fetched from a CDN — a shipped template should not depend on an external host.
    • Your existing slideshow settings still drive it. Transition speed, auto-advance and its delay, pagination and the prev/next arrows are all read from the template's existing slideshow parameters, so a configured site keeps the same behaviour.

    Modern social networks

    • The social set has been brought to 13 networks: X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Pinterest, Discord and RSS. Every link now carries target="_blank" and rel="noopener".

    Convenience

    • Show/hide control on every password field. Login, registration and account forms now have an eye icon to reveal what you have typed.
    • The site name / logo links to the home page by default. A fresh standalone install previously showed it unlinked (logoLinked in templateDetails.xml now defaults to on).
    • The slideshow is on by default in a fresh standalone install (cam_turnOn).
    • A Checkout button in the cart drop-down. Opening the cart from the header previously offered only a "Show Cart" link styled as a heading, with no visible way to check out. It now ends with a Checkout button, which appears once the cart holds products.

    Changed

    Joomla 3 → Joomla 5 API migration

    • 190 Joomla 3 static calls removed, template-wide — now 0. JError, JText, JFactory, JHtml, JRoute, JUri, JModuleHelper, JRegistry and the rest are gone in favour of the namespaced Joomla 4+ API, across index.php, component.php, error.php and the html/ overrides. These aliases exist only while the Behaviour - Backward Compatibility plugin is enabled.
    • Error pages work again. error.php used the removed aliases, and when error.php fatals Joomla cannot render any error page — every 404 was served as a 500, with the real error never shown.

    Bootstrap 5 rendering

    • The template renders on Bootstrap 5, with a compatibility layer translating the donor's Bootstrap 2 grid rather than shipping the BS2 framework itself. row-fluid usages fell from 548 to 283, the BS2 grid classes from 826 to 595 and input-append/input-prepend from 380 to 79 as the BS2 stylesheets were retired.
    • The print view and the VirtueMart pop-ups now use the same Bootstrap 5 foundation as the rest of the template. They were still loading the original Bootstrap 2 stylesheets — in some cases stylesheets that no longer exist and simply failed to load.
    • Style changes reach visitors immediately after an update. The stylesheets were served without a version marker, so browsers kept showing the cached copy until the visitor cleared their cache by hand.

    Template settings

    • The Joomla 3-era on/off switches are gone; the settings that remain render as Joomla 5 native switchers, so they read and save correctly on Joomla 5.
    • Web fonts are now requested with a direct stylesheet link and display=swap instead of the old JavaScript font loader, and Font Awesome has moved to version 6 with the v4 compatibility shim.

    Fixed

    • The password reset and login pages showed a blank page instead of the form. Pages without their own menu item borrowed the home page's template style, which hides the main content.
    • A PHP 8 fatal error on the cart's "Bill To / Ship To" address edit page — count(): Argument #1 ($value) must be of type Countable|array, null given, inherited from a legacy VirtueMart core view.
    • The home-page slideshow could render empty or 0px tall. The slide markup was still in the shape camera.js expected, so Swiper initialised against a container with no slides; and because camera.js used to reveal its own container, nothing un-hid it once camera.js was gone. The hero, its caption and its square pager are back to the proportions the design intends.
    • The slideshow caption could run up over the header band.
    • Home-page category tiles were forced square, adding roughly 600px of empty white to the page.
    • Product listings could collapse, letting the content below overlap the products.
    • The login dialog's fields were 21px tall, with the Password label sitting inline beside a half-width box.
    • The login page showed two password-reveal buttons.
    • The print and e-mail icons on a product page were pinned over the header instead of sitting with the product.
    • The footer search box was 31px tall with its button hanging out below it, and the footer ran the full width of the window instead of lining up with the rest of the page.
    • Headings that contain markup render as intended again. Output escaping was applied to the rich-text title settings, so markup in them printed as literal text.
    • Three settings pointed at stylesheets that are no longer part of the template, so the browser requested a missing file on every page load.
    • Joomla 5.4's "What's New" tour took over the first admin visit on a fresh install, sending every administrator link to the dashboard. The tour still works — it no longer starts by itself.
    • A JavaScript error on the Options screen (jQuery is not defined), after Joomla's own colour field stopped pulling in jQuery as a side effect. The template now declares that dependency itself.
    • The Options screen loaded its icon font from a content network that has shut down, so its icons failed to draw.

    Store pages

    • Product tiles in a row are all the same height again. A product with no price — a "call for price" item — rendered no price line at all, so its coloured caption panel finished 18px short of the tiles beside it.
    • The "Add to Cart" confirmation fits its box, with the two buttons stacked and legible rather than run together as one line of plain text.
    • The registration and billing forms no longer draw a line above and below every row — 32 rules on one form, which read as very busy on a phone.

    Phone and tablet

    • The header no longer reserves empty space above the page on phones, the search panel no longer shows a duplicate submit button, and the cart is a proper control in the phone toolbar.
    • A 98px white gap between the phone toolbar and the slideshow is gone.
    • The menu button now carries the template's own colour and lines up with the logo beside it, instead of being an outlined square sitting 8px low.
    • Opening a phone panel no longer dims the logo and menu button at the top of the page.
    • The checkout no longer runs its text to the very edge of the screen. The shipment and payment panels, the totals and the tax line all sit in from the edge, and the text inside those grey panels is inset from the panel edge rather than touching it.
    • Login and registration fields are at least 16px, so iOS no longer zooms in when you tap one and refuses to zoom back out.

    Removed

    Legacy frameworks and dead code

    • The Bootstrap 2 framework — bootstrap.css, bootstrap.min.css and the responsive, RTL and extended stylesheets.
    • The jQuery plugin stack — Superfish and Supersubs (the drop-down menus are now Bootstrap 5's own), Backstretch (replaced by CSS background properties), the jQuery.browser Internet Explorer shim, Modernizr, Selectivizr and html5.js.
    • Two template settings that no code could reach. The template read two values its own settings file never declared, so they always rendered as an incomplete style rule.
    • A development report file that was being included in the download.

    Retired services

    • A dead VirtueMart 3 payment plugin that VirtueMart 4 no longer ships, and which could never have been made to work on this version.
    • Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg and Blogger — all four services are discontinued.

    Security

    • 218 output-escaping helper calls added across the template and its overrides, so every template setting echoed into the page is escaped on the way out. Rich-text settings are filtered through Joomla's InputFilter in HTML mode, which still strips script, style, iframe and on* handlers.
    • The error page no longer leaks the server path of the file that raised the error.
    • Nothing is loaded from a third-party host at render time: the slideshow library, the icon set and the colour picker all ship with the template.

    Quickstart Installer

    • Bundles Joomla 5.4.10 and VirtueMart 4.8.4.
    • Two third-party VirtueMart demo templates removed — neither is part of this product, and both carried broken error pages of their own, so activating either returned a 500 instead of an error page.
    • A leftover template style belonging to a template not included with this product has been removed — selecting it would have broken the site's appearance.
    • Redirects, leftover override records and the administrator action log are emptied before the bundle is made, and the post-installation messages no longer greet a new site with a backlog.

    Package format

    • method="upgrade" is declared, so existing customers can install over the top without uninstalling first.
    • The version and release date are stated consistently in the manifest, the Options screen and the template's own header comment.
    • Dead settings that no code reads, parked override folders and editor backup files are all excluded from the shipped package.

    Earlier history (pre-5.4.10). Inspire originated as a Joomla 3 / VirtueMart 2-era template. The previous download (18.08.2025, Joomla 5.3.0 / VirtueMart 4.4.4) carried the Bootstrap 2 framework and Joomla 3 class aliases throughout; this release is the first with neither.
  • Release Date: 2025-08-18, Version: 18.08.2025 5.3.0/4.4.4, Notes:
    • Upgraded - Now compatible Joomla 5
    • Upgraded - Now compatible Virtuemart 4.4.4
    • Fixed - Minor bugs
  • Release Date: 2024-11-29, Version: 29.11.2024 5.1.2/4.2.12, Notes:
    • Fixed - Minor bugs with cart
  • Release Date: 2024-08-15, Version: 14.08.2024 5.1.2/4.2.12, Notes:
    • Upgraded - Now compatible Joomla 5
    • Upgraded - Now compatible VirtueMart 4.2.12
    • Fixed - Minor bugs
  • Release Date: 2024-01-18, Version: 18.01.2024 4.3.4/4.2.0, Notes:
    • Fixed - Minor bugs
  • Release Date: 2023-12-18, Version: 07.12.2023 4.3.4/4.2.0, Notes:
    • Updated - Compatible with PHP 8.2
    • Updated - Compatible with Joomla 4.3.4
    • Updated - Compatible with VirtueMart 4.2.0
    • Fixed - Minor bugs
  • Release Date: 2023-06-30, Version: 26.06.2023 4.3.0/4.0.13, Notes:
    • Fixed - VirtueMart Products Module bug
    • Fixed - Double ReCaptcha on VirtueMart Registration page
    • Fixed - Template toggle button not displaying
  • Release Date: 2023-06-23, Version: 16.06.2023 4.3.0/4.0.13, Notes:
    • Fixed - Menu Params error for adding in image on menu
  • Release Date: 2023-05-20, Version: 20.05.2023 4.3.0/4.0.12, Notes:
    • Fixed - Template updated to be compatible with Joomla 4.3
  • Release Date: 2022-09-09, Version: 09.09.2022 3.10.11/4.0.6, Notes:
    • Fixed - Joomla 3.10.11
    • Fixed - Template updated for PHP 8.0