First Joomla 5 native release. Nextor has been rebuilt for Joomla 5.4.10 + VirtueMart 4.8.4 + PHP 8.3 + Bootstrap 5. 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 (18.08.2025, Joomla 5.3.0 / VirtueMart 4.4.4): 47 files removed, 12 added and 56 modified, with 124 Joomla 3 static calls reduced to 0 across 33 files, 104 output-escaping helper calls added, and the js/ folder down from 32 files to 15.
Added
Template Options — colour pickers and a Favicon tool
All 54 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 donor bootstrapped the Joomla 3-era jscolor library from a <script> buried in a settings field's label attribute, which never ran 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 Options screen's own icons load again. They were fetched from MaxCDN, which has shut down, so they failed on every visit to that screen. They now come from the same current icon set as the front end.
A JavaScript error on the Options screen is gone. Joomla's own colour field used to pull in jQuery as a side effect; with that field replaced, older admin scripts that quietly depended on it began failing with jQuery is not defined. The template now declares that dependency itself.
The template's Details panel now follows whichever admin theme you have selected, instead of a hardcoded light treatment that was legible on Joomla's dark admin only by accident.
39 settings that were still Joomla 3-era checkboxes are now native Joomla 5 Yes/No switches.
Joomla 5.4's "What's New" tour no longer takes over the first admin visit. On a fresh install it was set to auto-start and to open at the dashboard, so every administrator link went to the dashboard instead of where you clicked.
Convenience
Show/hide control on every password field. Login, registration and account forms now have an eye icon to reveal what you have typed.
A Checkout button in the cart drop-down. Opening the cart from the header previously offered only a "Show Cart" text link, with no visible way to check out. It now ends with a Checkout button, which appears once the cart holds products.
The header cart is now a basket icon rather than the words "Show Cart", matching the phone layout, which already used an icon.
On phones, the second menu button opens the shop categories rather than repeating the main menu.
The site name / logo links to the home page by default in a fresh standalone install, and the slideshow is on and advances by itself. Both previously shipped off.
Changed
Joomla 3 → Joomla 5 API migration
124 Joomla 3 static calls removed, template-wide — now 0.JRoute (51), JHtml (29), JFactory (23), JText (16), JModuleHelper (4) and JError (1) are gone in favour of the namespaced Joomla 4+ API, across index.php, component.php, error.php and the html/ overrides — 33 files in all. These aliases exist only while the Behaviour - Backward Compatibility plugin is enabled.
Error pages work again. The template's error page used the removed aliases, and when it fatals Joomla cannot render any error page — every 404 was served as a 500, with the real error never shown. It has been rebuilt on the Joomla 4+ API.
The legacy form validator is gone. The VirtueMart login override called Joomla 3's behavior.formvalidation, removed in Joomla 5, which fataled with behavior::formvalidation not found. It now uses the Joomla 5 behavior.formvalidator. With thanks to Zoltán Szász, whose report led to this fix across our templates.
Bootstrap 2 → Bootstrap 5
The bundled Bootstrap 2 framework has been removed — eight stylesheets under css/ and css/bootstrap/ and js/bootstrap.min.js. The template now builds on the Bootstrap 5 that Joomla 5 already loads, with a compatibility layer that keeps the original design intact.
The print view, VirtueMart's pop-ups and the error page now use the same Bootstrap 5 foundation as the rest of the template. These three views still carried the original pre-Joomla-5 stylesheet stack, in some cases loading files that no longer exist. They also now load Bootstrap before the template's own styles, so they use the template's colours rather than Bootstrap blue.
Stylesheets
Style changes now reach visitors immediately after an update. The template's stylesheets were served with no version marker, so browsers kept showing the previously cached copy until the visitor cleared their cache by hand. Every local stylesheet and script is now stamped with its own file date.
Stylesheet requests for files that are no longer part of the template have been removed. Each returned the site's "page not found" response on every single page load.
The home-page slideshow engine is unchanged in this release. Nextor's slideshow has been kept as it is, so your existing slide settings, transitions and timings continue to behave exactly as before.
Fixed
Modules had no titles and no boxes
Every module on the page was rendering unwrapped and untitled. The template asks Joomla for its own module styling, and the file that provides it had no Joomla 5 equivalent — Joomla 5 resolves module chrome by a different route and silently falls back to raw, unstyled content when it is missing. Measured on the home page: 1 module box became 13, and 0 module headings became 9.
The header
The top bar was 14px too tall, which pushed the whole header down — the site name sat 12px low and so did the main menu.
The social icons were three plain coloured discs with no symbol in them. The symbol was being painted the same colour as the disc behind it.
The currency selector was a 173px-wide plain browser dropdown where the design calls for a compact label.
The header could render as a white band with white text on it. The header sits fixed over the hero, and a shared rule painted it solid white from page load rather than only once you scroll.
The login dialog and account forms
The login dialog's password box was half the width of the username box, and carried two "reveal password" buttons. One of them was the template's and one was Joomla's own; the template's also broke the field's layout. There is now one, and the two fields match.
The "Remember Me" checkbox was 2×2 pixels — effectively invisible.
My account, and the My account dialog, had no space between username, password and Remember Me — the rows were flush against each other.
On the registration page the login box's fields ran together with no gap between username, password, Remember Me and the button.
Registration and account forms no longer draw a line above and below every row.
Every field on the registration and account forms is the same width again. The required fields had become wider than the optional ones.
The "Ask a question" form no longer draws a horizontal line above and below every row, and the pop-up opens at its full size with the form fitting inside it.
On phones, the login pop-up's user icon sits beside the username field instead of on its own row, and both fields are the same height. On the registration page, Save and Cancel are the same size.
Shop and product pages
The cart's address-edit page no longer fatals on PHP 8. The "Bill To / Ship To" step in guest checkout called a method that no longer exists, so editing an address during checkout produced a blank page.
Product rows could collapse to a few pixels tall, letting the content below overlap the product tiles.
The product page's print and e-mail icons sat pinned in the header instead of beside the product title.
The quantity box lines up with the − / + buttons, and the green buttons lost a stray blue outline.
The "Read more" button was a plain grey Bootstrap button instead of the template's own.
The three address drop-downs on the registration and checkout forms were shorter than the text boxes beside them.
A broken image on the home page has been fixed — the demo content pointed at the site root while the file ships inside the template.
The cart and checkout
The "added to your cart" pop-up is sized to read properly, with its two links as proper buttons, and fits small phones. It used to be either narrower than its own text or wider than the screen.
The "I agree to the Terms of Service" checkbox had no space after it, so the box and the text ran together. It is also now a proper square checkbox.
Phones and tablets
The phone header's buttons have been rebuilt. The cart was a tall text chip rather than a control, and a black top bar 57px deep held two empty rows and a full-width browser dropdown. There are now six evenly sized buttons on one line and a 27px bar.
On phones the slideshow arrows no longer cover the "Find Out More" button, and the small footnote text is readable.
Opening a phone panel no longer dims the logo and menu button at the top of the page.
On phones, page titles share the template's one side margin instead of sitting further in, and the currency selector, which sat alone in a row above the logo, now sits at the bottom of the menu.
The mobile header no longer reserves an empty band above the page, the search panel no longer shows a duplicate submit button, and the menu button is guaranteed to contrast with the bar behind it.
Demo content
The home slideshow's buttons no longer lead to "page not found". All three slides linked to products that are not in the demo store; they now open real products and categories.
Maintenance fixes carried across our templates
The search icon rendered as a stray character and cost a failed request on every page. The stylesheet loaded an icon font from a Joomla 3 folder that no longer exists in Joomla 4 and later. The font is no longer requested and the search icon is now a self-contained image.
Pagination arrows showed as empty squares. Joomla 4 and later emit different icon names, which the template's icon styles did not map.
Tall featured articles were clipped to their title in the featured-articles view.
The search button was detached from its input box by a global button margin.
A MooTools-era tooltip script that nothing used has been removed.
With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose Expression bug report led to this maintenance pass across our templates.
Removed
The jQuery plugin stack is gone — jQuery 1.8.1 itself, together with nicescroll, slick, dropkick (both files), selectric, equalHeights, backstretch, flexibility, imgSizer, iscroll, modernizr, selectivizr, stellar, jQuery Mobile, superfish, supersubs, a parallax plugin, a MooTools-era tooltip script and the noConflict shim.
The print view and pop-up windows were loading a 2012 version of jQuery alongside the current one Joomla supplies. Removed.
The Internet Explorer stylesheetsie.css, ie6.css and ie9-10.css, the IE conditional loads that pulled them in, and the unused css/reset.css, css/slideshow.css, html/modules.php and utils/admin-js.js.
An override folder Joomla never reads, html/mod_menu_.
The old jscolor colour-picker library and its image set, which never loaded under Joomla 5.
Two dead VirtueMart 3 payment plugins that VirtueMart 4 no longer ships.
An internal development report file that was riding inside the shipped template tree.
Dead settings code — a sale-price colour rule that read a setting which does not exist, printing an invalid color: !important.
Security
Every template setting printed into the page is now escaped for where it lands — HTML text, attribute, CSS value, CSS url() and JavaScript string. Before this release a setting holding a quote or a fragment of markup could break out of the page. 104 escaping helper calls do that work, where the previous release had none.
The site name and slogan printed into image alt attributes went through a filter that removes tags but not quotes. They are now quote-escaped as well.
The two settings that are meant to contain markup, the two header titles, are filtered through Joomla's own HTML filter instead, which still strips scripts, styles, frames and inline event handlers.
Every social link carries rel="noopener".
Quickstart
Two third-party VirtueMart demo templates have been removed from the quickstart — they were not part of this product, served no purpose in a customer install, and carried broken error pages of their own, so activating either would have produced a 500 instead of an error page.
Article hit counters start at zero, the copyright year is current, and the administrator's post-install messages are the five Joomla intros rather than sixteen.
Package
Built against Joomla 5.4.10 and VirtueMart 4.8.4, PHP 8.3.
Ships a proper Joomla package manifest, so the template installs and updates as a package and is offered updates through Joomla's own Update Manager.
php -l clean across all 79 PHP files; xmllint clean on the manifest.
