Added

Bootstrap 5 rendering through a compatibility stylesheet

• css/bs2-bs5-bridge.css — a new stylesheet that translates VM Shop Blue’s Bootstrap 2 grid, responsive utilities, 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 — VM Shop Blue’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 and the VirtueMart form field sizes — survives on the new foundation.
• The login dialog opens as a Bootstrap 5 dialog (data-bs-toggle="modal"), and its Close control is a real button with data-bs-dismiss="modal" in place of a link that hid the dialog with inline jQuery. Bootstrap 5 data-bs-* attributes across the template: 7 → 15.

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; the cart and account panels close with a tap outside them, and the cart panel sizes to its contents; 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, and whatever menu module you place there opens from the second button instead of repeating the main menu. A new layout for the VirtueMart category module, html/mod_virtuemart_category/csmenu.php, lists the shop categories with a “+” on each to open its subcategories.
• The phone header sits in the page flow with square corners: 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.
• One side inset on phones. The page body carries no extra side gutter (<body class="cs-no-bs2-gutter">), and the logo and breadcrumb now start 20 px from the screen edge, in line with the banner and the page content; before, they sat 30 px in (template padding plus a breadcrumb margin). Desktop is unchanged.
• The phone header stays bright when a panel opens. Opening search or another phone panel dims the page behind it; the header used to let the dimmed page show through its transparent background, so the logo’s own white background stood out as a white box. The header now has its own white background, edge to edge.

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 VM Shop Blue, with its header, menus, sidebar and footer and a real 404 status, 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.

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_VMSHOPBLUE_FAVICON_*, TPL_VMSHOPBLUE_FAVICONTOOL_*); the language files go from 72 to 82 strings. With thanks to Gianluca, whose favicon question inspired this tool.

Modern social network support

• Eight new social services, each with its own URL field and show/hide switch: Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Discord (instagram/instagramON, threads/threadsON, bluesky/blueskyON, mastodon/mastodonON, youtube/youtubeON, tiktok/tiktokON, pinterest/pinterestON, discord/discordON).
• 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 old image-sprite icons with “Follow Us” text.

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/cs-jq-compat.js — a small shim covering the jQuery 1.x conventions that the camera slideshow and other older libraries still call, so they keep working on the jQuery 3 that Joomla ships.

Changed

Joomla 3 → Joomla 5 API migration

• 254 Joomla 3 static class calls reduced to zero — JFactory, JText, JHtml, JRoute, JError, JDispatcher 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/com_virtuemart/cart/default_pricelist.php (22), html/mod_login/default.php (20), html/com_virtuemart/productdetails/default.php (17), html/com_virtuemart/user/login.php (14), html/mod_virtuemart_product/single.php and index.php (8 each).
• The VirtueMart login override’s plugin hook used JDispatcher::getInstance()->trigger(); JDispatcher does not exist in Joomla 5 or 6, and the hook now goes through the application’s event dispatcher.
• 55 of the 82 PHP overrides changed: VirtueMart user (14), productdetails (6), askquestion, cart and virtuemart (3 each), category (2), com_content category, featured and archive (6), mod_menu (4 plus the parked mod_menu_ copy), html/layouts/chromes (2), mod_articles_latest, mod_login and mod_virtuemart_product (2 each), and mod_breadcrumbs, mod_search, mod_virtuemart_cart, _currencies and _manufacturer.

Page grid, desktop frame, logo link and slideshow

• index.php’s page layout moves onto Bootstrap 5’s grid: span columns 13 → 0, row-fluid rows 17 → 2, with .row / .col-md-N in their place.
• Wider page. On screens 1200 px and wider the page now runs in a 1170 px frame; css/responsive-template.css held it at a fixed 960 px. The narrower desktop, tablet and phone widths are unchanged.
• 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.
• The built-in slideshow is on by default. cam_turnOn had no default either, so the slideshow stayed off until it was switched on; it now defaults to on.
• On phones the slideshow shows the whole banner at its own proportions instead of a 200 px crop of its middle, which cut the banner’s text off at both ends, with a row beneath it for the pager dots and the previous / next arrows, so the arrows no longer sit on the banner text.

Header and cart (desktop)

• The cart sits on one line with My account / Register. The cart box used to take a row of its own under the account links, with its right edge cut off. It is now a compact cart icon with an item-count badge and “Show Cart”, on the same line as the account links and social icons.
• The cart panel leads to checkout. The Show Cart panel had a fixed 313 px height with empty space, and its only link to the cart was a small grey heading. It now fits its contents and ends with a “View cart & checkout” button.

Template options (administrator)

• 109 field type changes in templateDetails.xml:
  • 78 colour settings: type="text" → type="colorpicker". On Joomla 5 each rendered as a plain text box, because the old jscolor library that was meant to turn them into pickers never loaded, so a colour could only be changed by typing its hex code. Each now opens a real picker with a live swatch. Existing values carry over.
  • 31 on/off settings: legacy class="switch" type="checkbox" fields → Joomla 5’s native radio switcher (for example logoLinked, cam_turnOn, cam_autoAdvance, usetheme, RSSON). With the eight new social switches the template has 39 switchers and no legacy checkboxes.
• Template options: 179 → 183 fields, 9 → 10 tabs. Tab names lose their redundant “Settings” suffix (“Drop Down Menu”, “Built-in Slideshow”, “Product Slider”, “Product Images”, “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 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 template no longer loads its own copy of jQuery 1.8.1 and jquery.noConflict.js, which index.php printed from inside a PHP string; it uses the jQuery that Joomla ships. The jQuery.browser compatibility block went with it.
• A body background image set in the template options is sized with CSS (background-size: cover, fixed and centred) in place of the jQuery Backstretch plug-in.
• The currency selector is a native <select>; the DropKick plug-in that restyled it is no longer loaded.
• The slideshow no longer loads jquery.mobile.customized.min.js, which throws an error on the jQuery 3 that Joomla 5 ships.
• 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 (1 → 0).
• Front end: Font Awesome 5.0.1 from use.fontawesome.com → Font Awesome 6.5.2 (all.min.css + v4-shims.min.css). The 11 older fa fa-* class names in the overrides keep working through the shims.
• Template-side jQuery call sites: 132 → 90.

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; its Internet Explorer stylesheet and dead links are gone.

Stylesheets and layout

• Every local stylesheet link carries 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 an extra 20 px side indent, so it lines up with the products below it.

Version

• templateDetails.xml <version> 22.09.2025 5.3.0/4.4.4 → 5.4.10, matching the Joomla release it is built on. The <creationDate>, 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.

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 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

• Product-card option boxes were cut off. In the home page product modules (the sidebar product slider and the single-product modules) the add-to-cart area was pinned to 128 px by vm-blue.css, so a size or format select left 94 px for its text and cut options such as “DVD No additional charge”. The form and its select now span the card (about 200–218 px on desktop, 275 px on a phone), while the quantity and Add to Cart row keeps its centred 128 px box.
• Blank buttons on the cart page. The cart’s update-quantity and remove controls drew their icons from media/jui/img/glyphicons-halflings.png, which Joomla 4 removed, so they showed as empty boxes and the cart page logged a failed request. They now show Font Awesome 6 glyphs in the table’s own readable text colour.

Requests for files that do not exist

• Three dead @import rules in css/print.css — media/jui/css/bootstrap.min.css, bootstrap-responsive.min.css and bootstrap-extended.css, from a folder Joomla 4 deleted. Browsers fetch print stylesheets and their imports on every page, so each returned a “page not found” on every page load.
• The print view and pop-ups requested css/vm-prime.css, a file that has never been in this template; the link is gone.
• The front-end editing icon rules in css/template.css (.edit .icon-ok, .edit .icon-cancel) and the cart-control rule pointed at the removed media/jui/img/ sprites; those dead background images are gone.
• The jscolor <script> tag in the manifest description pointed at utils/js_colourchanger/ and failed every time the Options screen opened; it is 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 in place of the search icon. 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, ie6.css and ie9-10.css, and the old stand-alone error page’s reset.css and 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), jquery.dropkick-1.0.0.js (select boxes), jquery.mobile.customized.min.js (slideshow touch support), jquery-1.8.1.min.js and jquery.noConflict.js, the Internet Explorer helpers html5.js, modernizr.js and selectivizr-min.js, and Google’s webfont.js. No file was removed from js/ (29 → 33 files with the four new scripts): 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. Joomla 4 and later read module chromes only from html/layouts/chromes/.
• html/layouts/chromes/toggleModule.php and toggleModule2.php — two module chromes built on MooTools addEvent, which Joomla 4 and later no longer ship (MooTools calls 4 → 0).
• html/com_virtuemart/user_/ — a parked, unused copy of the VirtueMart account overrides (21 files, one of them still calling behavior.formvalidation). Joomla never read it; the live overrides in html/com_virtuemart/user/ remain.
• utils/admin-js.js and the old colour-picker folder utils/js_colourchanger/ (jscolor.js and its four images), superseded by the current field types.
• In total the shipped tree moves from 294 files to 269: 12 added, 37 removed, 67 modified.

Retired options

• Social slots for Google+, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg and Blogger, services that have closed or no longer offer profile links (gplus, myspace, stumbleupon, digg, blogger and their switches).
• The Superfish drop-down settings that went with the old menu plug-in (dropopacity, dropheight, dropwidth, dropspeed, dropdownhandler1), and the colours_handlers spacer that tried to start the old jscolor picker.

Security

• 13 output helpers added to index.php, used 279 times across the template, so every template setting written into the page is escaped for where it lands:
  • phEsc(): HTML text and attributes.
  • 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.
  • phJsStr(), phJsLit(): values written into inline JavaScript, such as the slideshow settings and the background image.
  • phFaviconSet(), phIcoBytes(): favicon output.
• htmlspecialchars / escape calls in the template: 48 → 96, with new escaping in the slides and vmdefault module chromes, the mod_menu, mod_login, mod_breadcrumbs, mod_articles_latest and mod_virtuemart_cart overrides, the content category and featured views, 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.
• 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.

Quickstart

• Bundles Joomla 5.4.10 and VirtueMart 4.8.4, with VM Shop Blue 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, VM Shop Blue. The site templates/ folder holds only cassiopeia, vmshopblue and system. 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. Two leftover template styles for templates not included with this product (aeon, vmbusiness) are gone too.
• A new Store Categories (phone second hamburger) module in the cs-secondary position, so the second phone menu button opens Automotive & Industrial, Clothes & Shoes, Electronics & Computers and Movies & Books, each with its subcategories.
• The built-in slideshow is on, with autoplay, and its height is set to the slides’ own 920:200 proportion (cam_height 20% → 21.7%), so the whole banner shows in the 1170 px frame instead of a cropped strip.
• The dead VirtueMart 3 Klarna and Klarna Checkout payment plugins, which VirtueMart 4 no longer ships, are removed.
• 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 and the action log are empty, the template overrides are marked as reviewed (no “changes found” warning), and article, category and product view counts start from zero.
• A duplicate VirtueMart update site, which listed the same item twice in the Update Manager, and an update site left with unreplaced ${PHING…} build tokens are disabled.

Package

• Installs as an upgrade over an existing copy. The template manifest’s opening tag read <extension version="3.10" … manage="upgrade">; manage is not an attribute Joomla reads, so the manifest never declared an upgrade install and the update would not install over an existing copy. It now carries method="upgrade": no uninstall-first step, and your template settings are preserved.
• Standalone template: a Joomla package (pkg_vmshopblue.xml) that installs the VM Shop Blue template and registers it in the package manager, with method="upgrade" and <blockChildUninstall>true</blockChildUninstall>, 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 VM Shop Blue 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.