Brilliance Energize Themes Templates Changelog

Brilliance 6.1.3 is a major rebuild — the first release of this template under Cybersalt, and the first that is Joomla 6 native. The design is deliberately unchanged: your layout, colours, fonts and menu choices all carry over. What changed is everything underneath, so that Brilliance runs cleanly on current Joomla instead of depending on code Joomla has been retiring since version 4.

If you are already running Brilliance, install the template package over the top — your template settings are preserved and no re-configuration is needed.

With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose Expression bug report led to a maintenance pass across our templates. Several of the fixes below came out of it.

Joomla 6 native

• Brilliance now installs and runs on Joomla 6.1 without Joomla's backward-compatibility plugin. That plugin exists to keep very old extension code working, and Joomla 6 requires it switched off before it will allow the upgrade at all. Templates that still need it leave you stuck: turning it off breaks the site, leaving it on blocks the upgrade. Brilliance now uses current Joomla APIs throughout and is tested with that plugin disabled.
• The template version matches the Joomla version it is built and tested against — this release is 6.1.3, built for Joomla 6.1.3. The version shown on the template's own settings screen now agrees with it; it had been showing a 2024 date stamp.

Modern framework

• Bootstrap 5 is actually loading now. This is the big one. Brilliance loads its stylesheets as plain <link> tags rather than through Joomla's own asset system, and the Bootstrap 5 core was never reaching the page — all eight layout rows on the home page were computing as unstyled blocks instead of grid rows. Bootstrap 5 is now wired in properly and the grid behaves as designed.
• Rebuilt on Bootstrap 5. Brilliance previously shipped Bootstrap 2, which Joomla dropped years ago. The grid, buttons, forms and drop-downs now use the framework Joomla itself loads, instead of two versions fighting over your layout.
• Compatibility layer added for jQuery 3.7. Joomla 6 ships jQuery 3.7, which removed several functions templates of Brilliance's generation relied on.
• Uncaught JavaScript errors on every page load are gone. The menu override was still calling selectnav(), a library that had already been removed — every page threw a "selectnav is not defined" error, which stopped the rest of that script block from running. The Internet-Explorer browser-detection shim, and the old drop-down hover libraries, are gone too.
• The collapsible module panels work again. Three files that ship with the template were still written for MooTools — a JavaScript framework Joomla stopped bundling at version 3 — so the show/hide chrome on those modules had quietly done nothing for years. Rewritten to run without any framework at all.
• Collapsed sub-menus take up no space. A closed accordion section was still occupying its full open height, so a sidebar menu could push everything below it far down the page.
• Tabbed modules show one tab at a time, instead of rendering every panel at once, stacked down the page.
• Log-in and other pop-ups rebuilt on Joomla's current modal, including the close control, so the dialog opens, closes and re-opens correctly.
• The log-in dialog is visible — on the mixed framework stack it could open completely transparent, dimming the page around a box you could not see.
• Internet Explorer compatibility code and unused stylesheets removed, along with five legacy loaders the page no longer needs.

Layout

• The template's fixed width is now 1440 pixels, and the whole page shares it. The header, menu and slideshow were pinned to 960 pixels while the breadcrumb, side column and article body ran the full width of the monitor.
• The header is its full height again, and the slideshow below it is full width. A change in how Bootstrap 5 measures boxes shrank the header and let its contents spill out of the bottom, which in turn squeezed the slideshow band into a narrow strip off to one side.
• The fixed header sits at the top of the page at full width, instead of shrinking to the width of its own contents and dropping below a band of empty space, and it is no longer painted underneath the slideshow — it was present and correctly sized but completely hidden behind the slides.
• The header no longer stacks the logo, menu and top links one above another. Plain wrapper rows were being treated as grid rows, which forced every child to full width.
• Sections no longer stack on top of one another. Bands whose contents are all floated were collapsing to no height at all, so everything below was pulled up over the top of them.
• Sidebar and footer menu modules list vertically again. Bootstrap 5 redefined the list class Joomla uses for every menu module, which turned those menus sideways into a wrapping row of links and knocked everything below them out of position.
• Side-column modules are their own height. A module set to full height was stretching to the height of the entire row and shoving the modules below it off the bottom of the page.
• The footer no longer paints over the end of a long article list — the panel behind the content column now grows with the column instead of stopping short.
• Page content is no longer shifted off-centre by padding Bootstrap 5 adds and Bootstrap 2 did not.
• Featured articles are no longer clipped to their titles when the featured view is set to a single column.
• Article details wrap instead of running off the page. Written by, Category, Published and Hits were held on one unbreakable line, running past the edge of the content column on a phone and breaking mid-phrase on a desktop.

Sideways scrolling

• Pages no longer scroll sideways. This had several separate causes, all now fixed: drop-down panels parked off-screen were still counted in the page width, a row holding wide content refused to shrink to its container, the search field kept a fixed width inside a column the design narrows, and on phones the layout was sized against the overflow rather than the screen.
• Breadcrumbs stay on the page at tablet and small-desktop widths. On article and account pages the row holding them collapsed to no width, so the trail ran off the right-hand edge.

Icons

• Font Awesome updated from 4 to 6.5.2, with the version-4 compatibility shims kept so existing icon names in your content keep working.
• A missing icon font is no longer requested on every page. The stylesheet pointed at media/jui/fonts/, a folder Joomla removed at version 4 — so every page load fetched four font files that were not there, and the search icon rendered as a stray character.
• The old Bootstrap 2 icon sprite no longer peeks out from behind the new icons. A leftover glyph was still painting in the corner of icon elements, behind the Font Awesome one.
• Pagination arrows render as arrows. Joomla 4 and later emit icon classes the old icon stylesheet never mapped, which left the First / Previous / Next / Last buttons as empty squares.
• Joomla's passkey sign-in button is a normal size. Its icon carries no size of its own, so it expanded to fill the button — a large black passkey glyph painted across the log-in area.
• The show/hide-password eye takes the colour of the button it sits on. Drawn in fixed white, only its dark pupil showed on a pale button, so the control read as a single dot until you hovered it.

Social links

• The social bar has been brought up to date. Five networks that no longer exist were removed — Google+, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg and Blogger — and eight current ones added: Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Discord. Twitter is now X, with the current logo.
• Social icons show one icon each — the template's old icon image was still painting behind the new one, so two glyphs stacked inside one small box.
• The social icons sit centred in their circles, and the links carry proper labels for screen readers and open with the security attributes modern browsers expect.
• The "Follow Us" pull-tab no longer leaves a dead bar across the foot of a phone page. It only ever opened on hover, so it could not be used by touch at all, and its links are already in the phone menu.

Slideshow

• The home-page slideshow has been rebuilt on a current engine. The original slideshow script is unmaintained and does not survive modern jQuery; Brilliance now uses Swiper, keeping the same cross-fade.
• Slides sit at the top of the slideshow. A caption rule written for the old script also matched the new one and pushed every slide down by a third of the slideshow's height, leaving a white band above it and clipping the caption's button off the bottom.
• Slide captions are legible. They were white text on the pale panel the slides ship with — measured at a contrast ratio of 1.1:1, which is not "hard to read", it is invisible. The caption now uses the template's own dark text colour, at 11:1.
• The slideshow is a proper band on a phone instead of a sliver. Its height is a proportion of its width, which works out at about 77 pixels on a phone, with the caption overflowing well past the bottom. It now keeps a sensible minimum height, with caption text sized for a phone screen.

Mobile

• Brilliance has a proper mobile header. It ships a menu button, a slide-in menu with expandable sub-menus, and a row of controls for account, register, search and social links. The old phone menu was a flat list with no way to open sub-menus.
• The site logo shows on a phone again. It was being painted over by the new control row — the template positions the brand out of the normal flow, so it took up no space and the row landed on top of it.
• The menu button is centred on the brand, and its bars are centred inside it, and sized to match the controls beside it rather than standing noticeably larger than them.
• The icons in the phone control row are legible. Several were inheriting the header's white and landing on a white button — not faint, but blank — and the row's own colours were being repainted by the template's general button styling.
• The phone controls use your template's own colours, read from the template rather than inherited from a different one.
• The row of controls fits the screen and is evenly spaced. Its buttons had been running past both edges with uneven gaps, because two spacing systems were in play at once.
• The search button inside the phone search panel is visible — it was a blank white square on a white panel with nothing to show it was a search control.
• The "+" buttons that open sub-menus in the phone menu are readable; they were white on a light brand colour, well below a readable contrast.
• Two empty bands are gone from phone pages — a tall strip of header colour reserved for controls that moved into the new row, and a band of white under the breadcrumb bar reserved for a search box that is no longer there.
• The decorative band behind the brand no longer leaves a grey slab beside the logo, which had also made the menu button look tilted against it.
• Breadcrumbs flow as one line rather than stacking one crumb per row with a bullet beside each.
• Module content no longer runs off the right edge of a phone screen.
• Contact and other component forms stack to full width on a phone, with fields tall enough to tap, instead of squeezing a desktop two-column form into a phone-width column — and headings no longer sit hard against the screen edge while the text beside them is inset.
• Footer menu links show on a phone again (they were being caught by the rule that hides the desktop navigation), footer social icons are centred, the back-to-top control is a circle with its arrow centred in it, and the account and register links no longer appear twice.

Menus

• Drop-down menus stay open while you move onto them. There was a band of dead space between a menu item and its sub-menu, so the menu closed before the pointer arrived. Third-level menus now fly out beside their parent instead of dropping behind it.
• The old phone menu button no longer appears on a desktop. A retired mobile toggle was rendering at every width, alongside the real navigation.
• Sidebar menus open one level at a time on a desktop. A menu module with sub-items was rendering every level expanded — every page in the menu printed as one long flat list.
• Menu items pointing at software that is not installed have been cleared out, along with left-over language overrides from components this template does not ship. These rendered in the navigation and returned a "not found" page when clicked.

Forms, log in and search

• The show/hide-password control is a proper button beside the password field. It had come apart from the field entirely — wrapping onto its own line below it and shrinking to a 42×17 pixel sliver.
• The "Remember me" box in the log-in dialog is a checkbox again. It had been stretching to the full width of the dialog on a line of its own, and the helper links under it rendered as a bulleted list.
• The dead arrow beside the Log in button is gone. Tapping it submitted the form with an empty password and threw you out to an error page — and the forgotten-password, forgotten-username and create-account links it was hiding were unreachable by any other route. Those three links are now shown in the dialog itself.
• The social panel on a phone actually contains its icons. They were being dragged out of the panel as it opened, so it appeared to open empty.
• The search box is a usable size. It opened as a roughly 170-pixel drop-down with a 29-pixel-tall field; it is now full width under the header on a phone and at least 320 pixels wide on a desktop.
• The search field is its full height, so its button is not cut off. Bootstrap 5 measures field height differently from Bootstrap 2, which took height out of the field and left the row too short for the button inside it.
• The search button sits against its search field instead of drifting away from it, and the search box is centred in its bar rather than hugging the top with empty space beneath — the bar itself is now only as tall as it needs to be.
• The stray "Search" label above the search box is gone. It is hidden from view and still read out to screen readers, which is what it was always meant to do.
• "Login Form" in the header bar lines up with the links beside it instead of sitting at the top of its control, and the quick links in the top bar sit on the middle of the bar rather than a few pixels above it.
• The account-creation page no longer stacks modules above the form. Four sample modules were pushing the first field roughly 900 pixels down the page.

Security and PHP 8

• Output is escaped throughout the template. Template settings and content written into the page now pass through dedicated escaping helpers, closing off cross-site-scripting through template parameters.
• Retired Joomla 3 behaviour calls removed. These are fatal on Joomla 5 and later — a page that hit one returned a 500 error rather than rendering.
• All template PHP is syntax-checked as part of the build, and the packaged template carries no stray server logs or backup files.

Template settings

• The template's own settings screens are Joomla 5/6 native. 32 on/off controls used a Joomla 3 markup pattern that no longer renders as a switch; all are now native switches.
• Fixed corrupted styling on the settings screen. A find-and-replace during an earlier rebrand had rewritten a CSS property name itself, so two rules on the Options screen were invalid.
• The version and details Joomla shows for the template are rebuilt from the template's own manifest, so Extensions → Manage no longer reports stale information.

Housekeeping

• Demo page-view counters reset (27,082 recorded views cleared), stale copyright years brought to 2026, and installation messages tidied.
• Copyright, author and support details are now Cybersalt's.

Brilliance was rebuilt and verified by driving the rendered site — page types at phone, tablet and desktop widths, checked for JavaScript errors, layout overflow, contrast, and every control reported during testing — not by reading the files alone.

• Fixed - Template updated to Joomla 4.2