Major release — Creativa is now genuinely Joomla 6 native. This is the largest update Creativa has ever had. The template has been rebuilt from Bootstrap 2 onto Bootstrap 5, every Joomla 3-era programming call has been replaced with its modern Joomla 6 equivalent, output escaping has been applied throughout for security, the content area has been widened for today's screens, the phone experience has been built from scratch, and a long list of faults — several quietly broken for years — has been fixed. The quickstart ships Joomla 6.1.2. Everything below is in both the standalone package and the quickstart, and your existing settings are preserved.

Added

• Joomla 6 native foundation. Creativa no longer depends on Joomla's Behaviour — Backward Compatibility plugin, so it keeps working when that plugin is switched off — which is Joomla 6's own default. This matters more than it sounds: a template still relying on that plugin blocks the upgrade rather than merely misbehaving afterwards. Fifty obsolete Joomla 3-era calls were rewritten to reach this point.
• Security hardening throughout the template. Every value the template prints — settings, colours, dimensions, module output — now passes through proper output escaping, across 84 call sites. This closes the cross-site-scripting exposure class that unescaped template parameters create.
• A much wider content area. On large screens the page now uses up to 1440 pixels instead of the 940 it was locked to, so content, images and module rows have room to breathe on a modern monitor. Tablet and phone widths are unchanged.
• A real mobile menu. Creativa previously had no mobile menu at all — on a phone it printed the entire menu tree as one long list, pushing the actual page content far below the fold. The main menu now opens from a large, easy-to-tap button in the header and shows your menu as an accordion, with a second row of controls for the sidebar menu, log in, register, search and social links.
• Working search on phones. There was no way to search from a phone. There is now a full-width search box with its own submit button, wired to Joomla's Smart Search.
• A Favicon tab with a built-in crop tool. Choose any image in the template settings and Creativa automatically produces every icon size browsers and devices ask for — a real favicon.ico published at your site root, plus 32, 192 and 512 pixel icons and a 180 pixel Apple touch icon. If your image isn't square, the crop tool lets you pick exactly which square part becomes the icon. No FTP, no external service.
• A proper colour picker. All 34 colour settings now open a real colour picker with a live swatch and opacity support. Previously they were plain text boxes — the old picker script was never actually loaded by the template, so you had to type hex codes by hand.
• Modern social networks. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and Discord have been added. Icons are now scalable Font Awesome 6 vectors, so they stay sharp at any size.
• Modern settings switches. All 36 on/off options in the template settings are now native Joomla switches instead of the old Joomla 3-era checkbox widget, so they render and behave correctly in the Joomla 6 administrator.
• Font Awesome upgraded from 4.6.3 to 6.5.2 across the whole template, with compatibility shims so any Font Awesome 4 icon names used in your own content keep working.

Fixed

• Sidebar rendered above the content instead of beside it. On pages with a sidebar module the menu stacked on top of the article area rather than sitting alongside it.
• Featured articles left a third of the row empty. The front-page article grid flowed downwards rather than across, so with three articles the last column stayed blank. It now fills the full width in reading order.
• Slideshow was cut off at the bottom. The slide area was a fixed height while the slides themselves were sized from the page width, so on wide screens and on phones the lower part of each image disappeared behind the section below it.
• Slideshow captions sat off-centre, and the navigation arrows on phones were clipped at the screen edges. Captions are now centred and the arrows sit fully visible against each edge.
• The log-in pop-up used obsolete Bootstrap 2 markup and would not open on a current Joomla. It has been migrated to Bootstrap 5, centred, with working close controls.
• The drop-down menu depended on three abandoned jQuery plug-ins (superfish, supersubs, and a jQuery 1 browser-detection shim). It has been rewritten in plain JavaScript with a hover delay, so the menu no longer relies on code that has not been maintained in a decade.
• Pagination arrows and the password show/hide eye rendered as empty squares. Joomla 4 and later emit icon names the template had no artwork for; all of them are now mapped to Font Awesome 6.
• Featured articles could be clipped to just their title when displayed in a single-column layout.
• Sideways scrolling on phones. The dropdown menus were being positioned off-screen to the right, making the whole page scroll horizontally. Search results did the same, because long result URLs could not wrap.
• Footer and header columns bunched to one side instead of spreading across the page, and the footer copyright sat mid-page rather than at the right edge.
• A PHP 8 warning in the breadcrumbs override when no module class suffix was set.
• An invalid CSS property appeared twice in the settings file — text-creativa, a mangled text-transform inherited from the template this design was originally built from.
• The template shipped an administrator script that could not run on Joomla 6, plus an unused colour-picker library. Both have been removed.
• Retired dead components. The obsolete Joomla 3 search component, the old Bootstrap 2 files and several leftover development files no longer ship. Menu links that pointed at the old search now point at Joomla's Smart Search, keeping their labels.
• The version shown in the Joomla admin now tracks the real release version. It had been displaying a 2013-era number.

Requirements

• Joomla 6.1 or newer · PHP 8.3 or newer · Bootstrap 5
• The quickstart bundles Joomla 6.1.2.

Known limitations

• The two collapsible module styles do not collapse. Their code targets MooTools, a JavaScript framework Joomla removed years ago, so the collapse action has not worked for a long time. The files load without error — assigning one of these styles will not break a page — but the collapse itself is inert. A dependency-free rewrite is queued for a follow-up release.
• Some carried-forward libraries remain. The slideshow still uses camera.js and therefore still loads jQuery. These are working dependencies rather than dead code, but they are on the list to modernize.

With thanks

With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose Expression bug report led to this maintenance pass across our templates.