Novel 6.1.3 is a maintenance release. It renumbers the template to match the Joomla version it is built and tested against, refreshes the Quick Start onto the current Joomla release, and brings the Bootstrap compatibility stylesheet up to the current shared build. There are no changes you need to make after updating — your settings, colours and menu choices carry over.

Version numbering

• The template version now matches the Joomla version it ships against. Novel 6.1.3 is the build for Joomla 6.1.3. The previous release of this template was numbered 6.1.2.10. This is a numbering change only — Joomla still treats 6.1.3 as newer than 6.1.2.10, so the update comparison in your Extensions Manager behaves normally, and nothing about how you install or update the template changes. We are applying the same convention across the whole template range so that the number on the download tells you at a glance which Joomla release it was tested against.

Quick Start

• The Quick Start package now installs Joomla 6.1.3. The previous Quick Start bundled Joomla 6.1.2. If you are building a new site from the Quick Start you now get the current Joomla release straight away, instead of installing and then immediately having to run a core update.
• The Quick Start no longer creates template styles for templates it does not install. Nine leftover style records — Atomic, Beez2 (two of them), Beez5, Bluestork, Encore, Equinox, Essential and Logic — were being carried in the Quick Start's database. After installing, they appeared in System → Site Template Styles pointing at templates that are not on disk, which is confusing and serves no purpose. They have been removed at source. No menu item referenced any of them, so nothing you have set up is affected. This only concerns new Quick Start installations; an existing site is unchanged.
• The Quick Start is a standard Joomla installation package — upload it, extract it, and run the normal Joomla installer in your browser. Akeeba Kickstart is not needed.

Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 5 compatibility stylesheet

• Brought up to the current shared build, adding twenty-five further layout guards since 6.1.2.10. These were found and fixed on other templates in our range during August, and are included here as a preventative update so that Novel is protected against the same classes of problem rather than waiting for one of them to surface on your site. The areas covered are: drop-down menu behaviour and flow; mobile header layout, ordering and spacing; slideshow controls on touch screens, which are revealed on hover and so were unreachable by tap; social icon rendering where a template's own image sprite competed with the Font Awesome 6 glyphs that replaced it; tooltips and popovers becoming visible on the page before they were triggered; page bands that pin themselves to a fixed desktop width and so scroll sideways on a phone; grid children that lost their block display; and full-height column panels that clipped the content they were meant to wrap.

What is not in this release

• No template file other than the Bootstrap compatibility stylesheet changed between 6.1.2.10 and 6.1.3. Everything shipped in the 6.1.2.x line — the Joomla 6 native rebuild, the removal of the JavaScript errors that fired on every page load, the jQuery compatibility layer that keeps the slideshow and parallax bands working, the Font Awesome mapping that restored the password show/hide button and the pagination arrows, the log-in dialog that now opens fully visible, the mobile overflow and drawer fixes, the drop-down menu positioning corrections, the changelog now being included in the download, and the Quick Start clean-up that removed template styles pointing at templates not in the package — is carried forward unchanged in this package.
• Known limitation, unchanged and disclosed: the template still loads jQuery and a number of carried-forward jQuery plug-ins. These are dependencies the template genuinely uses, not dead code, and removing them is a larger piece of work than a maintenance release should carry.

With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose Expression bug report led to the maintenance pass across our templates that several of these compatibility-stylesheet guards came out of.

Quickstart maintenance release. This affects new quickstart installations only — if you already have Novel running, there is nothing you need to do.

• Removed nine leftover template styles carried over from much older Joomla versions (Atomic, Beez, Bluestork and others). They referred to templates not included in the package, and after a quickstart install they appeared in System → Site Templates Styles pointing at templates that were not there.

• Drop-down menus now sit directly beneath the menu they open from. They previously appeared a short distance below, and moving the mouse across that space closed the menu before you arrived. Sub-menus that open to the side are likewise flush against the column they come from.

• Drop-down menus now sit directly beneath the menu they open from. They previously appeared a short distance below, and moving the mouse across that space closed the menu before you arrived. Sub-menus that open to the side are likewise flush against the column they come from.

• The changelog is now included in the download. Previous releases shipped without one, so the release history was only available on our website. The full history is now in the package as both a plain-text and a formatted file.

• Drop-down menus no longer close before you can reach them. On desktop, moving the mouse from a menu heading down to its drop-down crossed a gap where neither was hovered, so the menu closed on the way down. The whole path is now hoverable. The menu's spacing and appearance are unchanged.

Maintenance release. This update is recommended for all users — it removes JavaScript errors that could stop other features on the page from working, and improves the template's behaviour on phones.

• Fixed a JavaScript error that occurred on every page, caused by a legacy mobile-touch library that cannot load under the version of jQuery Joomla 6 ships.
• Removed leftover calls to jQuery plugins that are no longer bundled. A call to a missing plugin stops every remaining script in the same block from running, so this can affect features that look unrelated.
• Added a small compatibility layer for three jQuery methods that were removed before the version Joomla 6 ships, so slideshow controls and parallax backgrounds keep working.
• Updated the Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 5 compatibility stylesheet to the current build.
• The log-in dialog now always opens fully visible. Previously it could open with the page dimmed behind it but the dialog itself invisible.
• Pages no longer scroll sideways on a phone, and the mobile menu, search and social panels are now sized to the screen rather than to the full page width.

Major release — Novel is now genuinely Joomla 6 native. This is by far the largest update Novel 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, the phone experience has been rebuilt from scratch, and a long list of faults — several of which had been quietly broken for years — has been fixed. The quickstart ships Joomla 6.1.2. Everything below ships in both the standalone package and the quickstart, and your existing settings are preserved.

With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose Expression bug report led to a maintenance pass across our templates — several of its fixes are included here.

Added

• Joomla 6 native foundation. Novel 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 that still relies on that plugin blocks the upgrade rather than merely misbehaving after it.
• A Favicon tab with a built-in crop tool. Pick any image and the template builds the complete set of icons every device needs — a real favicon.ico (16, 32 and 48 pixel) published at your site root, plus 32, 192 and 512 pixel versions and a 180 pixel Apple touch icon. If your image isn't square, the crop tool lets you choose exactly which square part becomes the icon. Leave the field empty and the template's own default favicon is used.
• A modern colour picker with transparency. All 76 colour settings now use a picker with a live preview, brand swatches and an opacity slider, so you can set semi-transparent colours. Values stay as ordinary hex codes, so anything you had set before still works.
• A real mobile menu. The main menu now opens from a large, easy-to-tap button at the top right of the logo row (56×56 pixels) and shows your actual menu structure as an accordion — sections with sub-pages expand and collapse with a + / − button, and opening one section closes the others. Previously phones got a flat, dash-prefixed list in which every level of the menu ran together.
• A second menu row on phones — one evenly spaced, centred utility row holding the secondary-menu button, account, register and search, every target a proper 44×44 pixel touch size.
• A second menu button on phones. Sites that use Novel's second menu now get their own button in that row, opening it as a full-width panel. On pages that don't carry a second menu, the button removes itself rather than opening an empty panel.
• Search on phones — tapping the magnifier opens a full-width panel anchored beneath the header, with a large field and a visible Search button. Previously phones had no Search button at all — the only way to run a search was to press Enter or Go on the on-screen keyboard, with nothing visible to say so.
• Modern social networks — Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok and Discord added, alongside X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest and RSS.
• Font Awesome 6.5.2 with version-4 compatibility shims.
• Package-based distribution — Novel now installs as a package and registers with Joomla's own Update Manager.

Changed

• Rebuilt on Bootstrap 5 (previously Bootstrap 2), with a compatibility layer that preserves the original Novel design while the underlying framework is fully modern.
• Over 100 obsolete Joomla 3-era programming calls were replaced across the template, and a further ten deprecated calls moved to the forms Joomla 7 will expect.
• Every on/off switch in the template settings now uses Joomla's native switch control, so the settings screen matches the rest of Joomla 6. No legacy checkbox switches remain.
• Google Fonts now load through a direct stylesheet link with preconnect and display=swap, replacing the old JavaScript font loader — text appears sooner.
• The site search now uses Joomla's Smart Search. Menu links pointing at the old search component were repointed, so your navigation is unchanged.
• The login window is now a properly centred Bootstrap 5 dialog.
• The Contact Us link is centred on phones rather than pushed to one edge.
• The quickstart ships a clean install — article view counts zeroed, Joomla's setup-nag messages cleared, leftover unused templates removed, and the demo site's own activity logs, sessions and redirect history stripped out, so a new site starts tidy rather than inheriting demo clutter.
• Footer copyright year rolled forward to the current year.

Fixed

• The entire Theme Settings colour panel did nothing at all. Every one of its colour settings was inert — changing a colour there had no effect on the site, at any screen size, and had been that way in the shipped template. The panel now works, and every colour has been pre-set to match the design as it currently appears, so your site's appearance does not change when you update.
• Three tabs were missing from the template settings screen — including Joomla's own Menu Assignment and the Theme Settings colour panel itself, which meant the colour settings were not merely inert but largely unreachable. The cause was a single mis-encoded character in a language file.
• The password show/hide button was an empty square on both login and registration. Joomla emits its own icon vocabulary, which a third-party template does not map onto Font Awesome. Novel now ships that map.
• The Previous / Next / First / Last pagination buttons could render blank on category lists, for the same reason. All four now display correctly.
• The slideshow's next / previous arrows never appeared on a touch screen. They were drawn only on mouse-hover, so on a phone or tablet there was no arrow and no sign the slideshow could be moved at all. They are now permanently visible on phones.
• The second-menu panel on phones could be opened but not closed. The dimming overlay sat above the row holding the close controls and absorbed every tap on them, leaving the panel stuck open. The row now sits above the overlay, and tapping outside the panel or pressing Escape also closes it.
• Colour and style changes could take up to a month to appear for visitors. The template's colour stylesheets carried no version marker, so the content delivery network kept serving an old copy long after the change was made. They now update immediately.
• A featured-article layout could clip a tall article down to just its title.
• The pop-up login window opened only partially on some pages.
• The template version shown in the Joomla administrator was out of date and is now correct.
• Template overrides were reviewed and marked as checked, so Joomla stops flagging them after core updates.

Removed

• Joomla's long-removed Search component and module, left over from an old migration. These were removed from Joomla itself in version 4 and would stop the site loading on Joomla 6.
• Three abandoned JavaScript plug-ins — the Superfish/Supersubs menu, Backstretch backgrounds and DropKick select styling — replaced with built-in equivalents.
• Internet Explorer conditional blocks and related workarounds.
• The obsolete legacy on/off switch controls in the template settings.
• An unregistered duplicate copy of the template that had been shipping inside the template folder, a dead Bootstrap 2 stylesheet directory, and several stray backup files — roughly 1.3 MB of dead weight removed from the download.

Security

• Output escaping applied throughout the template — every template setting printed into the page is now escaped.
• Direct-access guards confirmed on every template entry point.
• PHP 8 compatibility work throughout.

Known limitations

• The slideshow still uses the camera.js library, and the template still loads jQuery along with a small number of older jQuery plug-ins. Migrating these to modern replacements is scheduled for a later release.
• The error page and component-only views (print view, pop-ups) still load Bootstrap 2 directly rather than the new compatibility layer. They render correctly today; this is queued for a follow-up.

• Update - Template updated to Joomla 6.0.0
• Minor Bugs fixed

• Update - Template updated to Joomla 5.3.0
• Minor Bugs fixed

• Update - Template updated to Joomla 5
• Minor Bugs fixed

• Fixed - Template updated to be compatible with Joomla 4.2