Added

Bootstrap 5 rendering through a compatibility stylesheet

• css/bs2-bs5-bridge.css — a new stylesheet that translates Viena Shop’s Bootstrap 2 grid, responsive utilities (hidden-phone, visible-phone and the rest), tabs, forms, buttons, navigation, pagination and dialogs onto Joomla’s Bootstrap 5. It is linked immediately before </head>, last in the cascade and with a file-time version marker, so it sits above the template’s own CSS.
• index.php now loads Joomla’s /media/vendor/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css (and bootstrap.rtl.min.css on right-to-left sites) in place of the template’s own Bootstrap 2 copies in css/bootstrap/.
• css/bs2-donor-base.css — Viena Shop’s original Bootstrap 2 form sizing, label columns and base typography, kept as a separate file and loaded straight after the Bootstrap 5 core, so the established look — the horizontal login form with its labels on the left, and the padding of the shop’s “Display #” select — survives on the new foundation.

Rebuilt phone layout

• js/cs-mobile-generic.js — a vanilla-JavaScript phone layer: a menu button that opens the main menu as a slide-out drawer, a search panel, and a toolbar of 44×44 px touch controls for the account and the cart. The cart control carries an item-count badge that updates after “Add to Cart”; the cart and account panels close with a tap outside them; the header takes on a scrolled state as the page moves.
• A second phone menu button for the shop. A new hidden module position, cs-secondary, is declared in templateDetails.xml (65 → 66 positions), and whatever menu module you place there opens from the second button instead of repeating the main menu. On phones the template’s own “Shop Menu” text link is hidden, because the second button now does that job; on tablets it is unchanged.
• The phone header sits in the page flow: no blank band above the page, a single submit button in the search panel, and a menu button that always contrasts with its bar. The search box uses 16 px text, so iPhones no longer zoom the page in when it is tapped.
• The phone header stays bright when a panel opens. Opening search, the account or the cart dims the page behind it while the header stays usable above it. Where the header has no background of its own, it now takes the solid colour that sits behind it while the panel is open, instead of showing the dimmed page through it, and gives it back when the panel closes.

Show / hide on password fields

• js/cs-password-eyeball.js — login, registration and account-maintenance password fields gain an eye control that reveals what has been typed.

Error pages inside the template

• error.php rewritten: “page not found” (404) and “access denied” (403) pages now display inside Viena Shop, with its header, menus and footer, a real 404 status and a noindex robots tag, and the message comes first on phones. Server errors (5xx) use Joomla’s minimal system page, because the database or a module may be what failed. Before, the error page was a bare stand-alone page with its own stylesheets, three of which did not exist.

Favicon tool

• A new Favicon tab in the template options (fieldset faviconsettings, fields favicon, faviconspacer and favicontool, field class fields/favicontool.php). Choose one image from the Media Manager and the template generates a 32×32 browser-tab icon and a 180×180 Apple touch icon from it (phFaviconSet(), phIcoBytes() in index.php); without one, the template’s favicon.ico is used. 10 new language strings (TPL_VIENA_FAVICON_*, TPL_VIENA_FAVICONTOOL_*); the language file goes from 74 to 84 strings. With thanks to Gianluca, whose favicon question inspired this tool.

Modern social network support

• Five new social services, each with its own URL field and show/hide switch: Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok and Discord (threads/threadsON, bluesky/blueskyON, mastodon/mastodonON, tiktok/tiktokON, discord/discordON). With X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest and RSS the footer social list covers 13 networks, plus the five custom slots.
• The Twitter link is shown as X (formerly Twitter); the stored twitter field key is unchanged, so your existing link carries over.
• The social links render Font Awesome 6 brand icons (fa-x-twitter, fa-facebook-f, fa-instagram and the rest) in place of the socicon icon-font glyphs.

Template options (administrator)

• fields/colorpicker.php, css/coloris.min.css and js/coloris.min.js — the open-source Coloris colour picker ships inside the template, so nothing is fetched from another site.
• fields/adminui.php — loads the Options-screen support code: the jQuery the older option scripts rely on, and a style that makes the template’s Details panel follow Joomla’s light or dark administrator theme.

Supporting scripts

• js/vendor/swiper/swiper-bundle.min.js and swiper-bundle.min.css — Swiper 11, bundled with the template rather than fetched from a content delivery network, for the home page slideshow described under Changed.
• js/cs-jq-compat.js — a small shim covering the jQuery 1.x conventions that the carousel, zoom and other older plug-ins still call, so they keep working on the jQuery 3 that Joomla ships.

Changed

Joomla 3 → Joomla 5 API migration

• 211 Joomla 3 static class calls reduced to zero — JRoute, JText, JHtml, JFactory, JURI, JModuleHelper, JPluginHelper, JRequest, JDocumentHTML, JDispatcher, JComponentHelper, JError and the rest, each replaced with its namespaced Joomla\CMS\* equivalent. These aliases exist only while the Behaviour – Backward Compatibility plugin is enabled, and not at all in Joomla 6.
• Heaviest files: html/mod_login/default.php (20), index.php and html/com_virtuemart/productdetails/default.php (16 each), html/com_virtuemart/user/login.php (14), html/com_virtuemart/askquestion/form.php and html/mod_virtuemart_product/single.php (13 each), html/mod_virtuemart_product/default.php (11).
• The plugin hooks in the VirtueMart login override and the ask-a-question form used JDispatcher::getInstance()->trigger(); JDispatcher does not exist in Joomla 5 or 6, and both hooks now go through the application’s event dispatcher.
• 51 of the 61 PHP overrides changed: VirtueMart user (14), productdetails (6), cart, category and virtuemart (3 each), sublayouts (2), askquestion (1), html/layouts/chromes (4), mod_menu (4), mod_virtuemart_product (2), and mod_articles_news, mod_breadcrumbs, mod_custom, mod_login, mod_search, mod_virtuemart_cart, _category, _currencies and _manufacturer.

Page grid, logo link and slideshow

• index.php’s page layout moves onto Bootstrap 5’s grid: span columns 61 → 12, row-fluid rows 30 → 9, with .col-md-N (49) in their place. css/template.css gained the matching .row / .col-md-N selectors beside its .row-fluid / .spanN rules, so the layout styling applies to both.
• The home page slideshow runs on Swiper 11 in place of camera.js. The slides are .swiper-wrapper > .swiper-slide with the image as a CSS background, and the slideshow still follows the template’s own settings: transition speed (cam_transPeriod), auto-advance and its delay (cam_autoAdvance, cam_time), the pager (cam_pagination) and the previous / next arrows (cam_navigation). The pager keeps camera’s 8 px grey squares with the accent colour on the active slide, and on phones the arrows sit in the pager row at the bottom corners, clear of the caption text. The slideshow no longer loads camera.css, camera.min.js, camera.js or jquery.mobile.customized.min.js, which throws an error on the jQuery 3 that Joomla 5 ships.
• The site name / logo links to the home page. The “logo linked” option (logoLinked) had no default, so a fresh install of the template showed an unlinked site name; its default in templateDetails.xml is now on, as on the demo.
• The built-in slideshow is on by default. cam_turnOn had no default either, so a fresh install showed no slideshow until it was switched on; it now defaults to on, as on the demo.

Cart

• The cart panel leads to checkout. The panel’s only action was a “Show cart” button at the top of the item list, and nothing in it said Checkout. That button now sits under the total, full width, labelled Checkout; it opens the VirtueMart cart page, where checkout happens. The same on desktop and phones.

Template options (administrator)

• 84 field type changes in templateDetails.xml:
  • 20 colour settings: type="color" → type="colorpicker" (for example sitenamecolor, slogancolor, cookiecolor1–3, cam_loaderColor). On Joomla 5 each rendered as a plain text box that needed a hex code typed in; each now opens a real picker with a live swatch. Existing values carry over.
  • 64 on/off settings: legacy class="switch" type="checkbox" fields → Joomla 5’s native radio switcher (for example logoLinked, cam_turnOn, cam_autoAdvance, usetheme, RSSON, OverrideDefaultSettings). With the five new social switches the template has 69 switchers and no legacy checkboxes.
• Template options: 217 → 215 fields, 12 → 13 tabs. Tab names lose their redundant “Settings” suffix (“EU Cookie Law Window”, “Drop Down Menus”, “Built-in Slideshow”, “Product Module Carousel”, “Testimonials Slider”, “Manufacturers Slider”, “Side Pop Up Box”, “Theme”), and “Template Header And Footer Custom Code” becomes “Header & Footer Custom Code”.
• The Options screen’s icon font was Font Awesome 4.6.3 from MaxCDN, which has shut down, so its icons failed on every load. It is now Font Awesome 6.5.2 with the v4 shims, so the fa fa-* icons the panel already uses display again.
• The Options screen no longer loads utils/admin-js.js from the manifest description.
• The template’s Details panel follows Joomla’s light or dark administrator theme; it used a hardcoded light treatment, grey text with a white shadow, that was barely readable on the dark theme.

Menus, scripts and fonts

• The drop-down menus open through the template’s CSS in place of the superfish.js + supersubs.js jQuery plug-ins. The jQuery.browser compatibility block that went with them is gone.
• A body background image set in the template options is sized with CSS (background-size: cover) in place of the jQuery Backstretch plug-in, which index.php loaded twice.
• The Internet Explorer helpers are gone from the page head: html5.js (fetched from Google Code over plain http), selectivizr-min.js, modernizr.js and the IE6 / IE7 conditional stylesheets.
• Google Fonts load through a stylesheet link (with display=swap) instead of the WebFontConfig JavaScript loader, which fetched webfont.js from Google before any font could load. Both loaders, in index.php and component.php, are gone (2 → 0).
• Front end: the page loaded two icon fonts from two hosts, Font Awesome 4.6.3 from MaxCDN and Font Awesome 5.0.1 from use.fontawesome.com. It now loads Font Awesome 6.5.2 once (all.min.css + v4-shims.min.css). Older fa fa-* class names keep working through the shims; they go from 21 to 11 in the template, and the overrides com_virtuemart/category/productsviewarray.php and mod_virtuemart_cart/default.php no longer use them.
• Template-side jQuery call sites: 138 → 125. The rest serve the Owl carousels (products, manufacturers, news and testimonials), the jquery.elevateZoom product image zoom, the cookie-law pop-up and the jump-to-top scroll.

Print view and pop-up windows

• component.php — the print view, which VirtueMart also uses for its “ask a question” and similar pop-up windows — now loads the same Bootstrap 5 core and compatibility stylesheet as the main layout, and fits a phone screen (viewport meta, images scale to the window). It was still running the original pre-Joomla-5 head.

Stylesheets and layout

• The template’s stylesheet links (template.css, blog.css, bs2-donor-base.css, the compatibility stylesheet, and template.css in the print view) carry a version marker (?v=), so a style change after an update reaches visitors immediately instead of waiting for them to clear a cached copy.
• The shop category description no longer carries a 20 px side indent (.category_description), so it lines up with the products below it.
• css/template.css: 184,378 → 188,959 bytes.

Version

• templateDetails.xml <version> 25.09.2025 5.3.0/4.4.4 → 5.4.10, matching the Joomla release it is built on, with <creationDate> 01/09/2016 → 2026-10-23. The Template Version: badge in the manifest description and the index.php @version docblock carry the same release, so the version shown in the administrator matches the download page.
• The manifest’s <copyright> was a bare web address; it is now a proper notice, and the author URL uses https.

Fixed

Pages that returned a server error

• Every “page not found” could be served as a 500. error.php called JError::raiseWarning() and JText. With the Backward Compatibility plugin off, and always on Joomla 6, those classes do not exist, so the error template itself failed and Joomla could not render any error page. It now raises a proper \Exception with the status code.
• A missing article or contact requested by its id answered 500 instead of the 404 page, because Joomla’s Schema.org plugin reloaded the missing item while the error page was being built. The error page now clears the item id along with the menu item id, so these requests get the 404 page.
• Login form validation: the VirtueMart login override (html/com_virtuemart/user/login.php) called behavior.formvalidation, which Joomla 5 removed (“behavior::formvalidation not found”, a 500). It now uses behavior.formvalidator. With thanks to Zoltán Szász, whose follow-up report led to this fix across our templates.
• Checkout address form on PHP 8: html/com_virtuemart/user/bs3-edit_address.php guarded its user-field script block with count($this->userFields['functions']) > 0, a fatal TypeError on PHP 8 when there are no user-field functions. It now uses !empty(), as edit_address.php already did. With thanks to Zoltán Szász, whose report found it.
• Shop front page: html/com_virtuemart/virtuemart/default.php called JHTML::_('behavior.modal'), a behaviour Joomla 4 removed. The call is gone.
• Ask-a-question form: html/com_virtuemart/askquestion/form.php called JHTML::_('behavior.framework') (the MooTools loader, removed in Joomla 4) before starting reCAPTCHA. The call is gone.
• Store owner’s account page: html/com_virtuemart/user/bs3-edit_vendor.php called JHtml::_('Select.genericlist') with a capital S, which Joomla 5’s HTMLHelper cannot resolve. All four calls now use select.genericlist.

Header and home page

• The home page product tabs showed “0 1 2” on phones instead of their titles: index.php printed the tab’s index number in the phone label. The phone labels now print the tab titles, as three equal-width tabs that keep whole words together.
• Three CSS media queries in index.php never applied. They were written @media (min-width: 980px) && (max-width: 1199px), and browsers discard a query joined with &&; they now use and. The navigation width set from the template options now applies at 768–1199 px, so on tablets “Shop Menu” sits beside “Menu” instead of dropping to a second line.

Requests for files that do not exist

• The error page requested css/reset.css, css/text.css and css/typography.css, which were never in the template. All three links are gone with the old error page.
• On right-to-left sites the main layout requested css/template-rtl.css, and the print view and error page css/template_rtl.css; neither file exists. The links are gone.
• 13 background images in css/template.css that were never in the template, among them the currency, search, quantity-arrow, add-to-cart, Ajax-loader and menu-separator images, and the PDF button, whose rule asked for pdf_Button.png where the file is pdf_button.png. Each was a failed request; those rules now draw no image.
• The front-end editing icon rules (.edit .icon-ok, .edit .icon-cancel) pointed at media/jui/img/glyphicons-halflings-white.png, a folder Joomla 4 removed; those dead background images are gone.

Maintenance pass

• IcoMoon icon font 404s. An @font-face rule in css/template.css pointed at media/jui/fonts/, a folder Joomla 4 removed: four failed requests on every page load, and a stray character wherever the family was used. The rule is disabled.
• Pagination arrows rendered as empty squares. Joomla 4 and later emit .icon-angle-left, -right, -double-left and -double-right, which the legacy icon stylesheet did not define. They now map to Font Awesome glyphs.
• Featured articles clipped to their title. Tall intro articles in a single-column featured view were cut off; .blog-featured .blog-item now uses display:block; overflow:visible; height:auto in that layout.
• The search button detached from its input. A global button margin separated them; the margin is cleared inside search and finder modules.

Removed

Legacy stylesheets

• No longer shipped: the bundled Bootstrap 2 stylesheet stack in css/bootstrap/ — bootstrap.css, bootstrap.min.css, bootstrap-responsive.css, bootstrap-responsive.min.css, bootstrap-extended.css, bootstrap-rtl.css and bootstrap-tooltip-extended.css. Joomla’s own Bootstrap 5 is used instead.
• No longer loaded: the Internet Explorer sheets ie.css and ie6.css, and the old stand-alone error page’s presets/style-error.css. The files remain in css/.

Legacy scripts no longer loaded

• superfish.js and supersubs.js (drop-down menus), jquery.backstretch.min.js (backgrounds), camera.js, camera.min.js and jquery.mobile.customized.min.js (slideshow), the Internet Explorer helpers html5.js, modernizr.js and selectivizr-min.js, and Google’s webfont.js. No file was removed from js/ (29 → 35 files with the six new ones): the ones that lived there are still there for custom code that references them.

Files removed

• html/modules.php — the Joomla 3 modChrome_* function file (vmdefault, vmtab, testimonial, megamenu, slides). Joomla 4 and later read module chromes only from html/layouts/chromes/, which carries the same five.
• html/layouts.zip and html/mod_login.zip — zip archives of override folders that were being shipped inside the template but never loaded.
• utils/admin-js.js — a Joomla 3-era Options-screen script, superseded by the current field types.
• In total the shipped tree moves from 229 files to 231: 13 added, 11 removed, 58 modified.

Retired settings

• Four social slots removed with their switches, for services that have closed or no longer offer profile links: Google+ (gplus), StumbleUpon, Digg and Blogger.
• The Superfish animation settings that went with the old menu plug-in: dropopacity, dropheight, dropwidth and dropspeed.
• Three settings the template never read (dropdownhandler1maxwidth, megamenuwidth, HRboxspeed), and the colours_handlers help note.

Download

• An earlier download of this template contained a server error log. It served no purpose in a fresh install and exposed file paths from our own build server. It was taken out of that download, and the new packages do not contain it.

Security

• 13 output helpers added to index.php, used 228 times across the template, so every template setting written into the page is escaped for where it lands:
  • phEsc(): HTML text and attributes, including every social link address.
  • phRichText(): the site-name fields (H1Title, H2Title), which may hold simple markup. Joomla’s input filter keeps the markup but strips script, style and iframe elements and on* event handlers.
  • phHexColor(), phCssDim(), phCssNum(), phCssFont(), phCssSelector(), phCssToken(), phCssUrl(): colours, sizes, fonts, selectors and image URLs written into the page’s CSS, and the theme preset name that becomes a stylesheet path.
  • phJsStr(), phJsLit(): values written into inline JavaScript, such as the carousel settings.
  • phFaviconSet(), phIcoBytes(): favicon output.
• htmlspecialchars / escape calls in the template: 3 → 38. Module titles are escaped in the megamenu, slides, vmdefault and vmtab module chromes, and new escaping covers four mod_menu layouts, mod_login, mod_breadcrumbs, mod_custom, mod_virtuemart_cart and the VirtueMart address-field overrides.
• Server paths no longer disclosed on error pages. Joomla’s own Newsfeeds component can turn a caught exception into a message that contains the site’s absolute filesystem path and a stack trace. Outside debug mode, error.php now replaces any such message with Joomla’s generic “An error has occurred” and keeps the status code. The message it prints is escaped; the old error page printed it raw, twice.
• Every link in index.php that opens a new tab — 18, the social links among them — now carries rel="noopener", so the opened page cannot reach back into your site’s window. None did before.
• Direct-access _JEXEC guards: 52 → 55 files.

Quickstart

• Bundles Joomla 5.4.10 and VirtueMart 4.8.4, with Viena Shop pre-configured as the active template. Also bundled: Akeeba Backup 10.4.0, Weblinks 5.2.0 and CS MCP for J 2.9.4.
• One template style, VIENA Joomla Shopping Cart Template for VirtueMart. The site templates are cassiopeia and viena only. Three unrelated templates from the original sample data — horme_3, vmbeez3 and vmbasic — are gone. None was the default or assigned to a menu item, and the first two carried error pages built on the removed Joomla 3 class aliases, so activating either would have produced a 500 in place of an error page.
• A new Shop Menu (phone section menu) module in the cs-secondary position, so the second phone menu button opens Phones, Watches, Cameras, Laptops, New Offer, Sale and New Collection.
• The built-in slideshow and the logo link are on, and the footer shows the X, Facebook and Instagram links.
• The site’s meta description reads “Viena VirtueMart Template”; it said “Axxen VirtueMart Template”, copied from another template.
• Joomla 5.4’s “What’s New” guided tour (tour 15) no longer starts by itself (autostart = 0); it used to send every administrator link to the dashboard on the first visits. It remains available from the administrator.
• Joomla’s Statistics plugin is set to never send data.
• A clean starting state: five post-installation messages remain enabled, the redirect list is empty, and the template overrides are marked as reviewed (no “changes found” warning).
• A duplicate VirtueMart update site, which listed the same item twice in the Update Manager, an update site left with unreplaced ${PHING…} build tokens, and the retired cdn.akeebabackup.com FOF 3.x update site are disabled.

Package

• Installs as an upgrade over an existing copy. The manifest keeps method="upgrade": no uninstall-first step, and your template settings are preserved.
• Standalone template: a Joomla package that installs the Viena Shop template and registers it in the package manager, so the template is removed through the package rather than on its own.
• Quickstart bundle: a complete Joomla 5.4.10 site with VirtueMart 4.8.4 and Viena Shop pre-loaded, in place of the previous Akeeba .jpa archive with Kickstart. The Joomla 3 and Joomla 4 downloads remain available but are no longer recommended for new projects.