Omega 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. Omega 6.1.3 is the build for Joomla 6.1.3. The previous release of this template was numbered 6.1.2.9. This is a numbering change only — Joomla still treats 6.1.3 as newer than 6.1.2.9, 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 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 6.1.2.9. These were found and fixed on other templates in our range during August, and are included here as a preventative update so that Omega 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 6.1.2.9 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 button label contrast correction, the log-in dialog that now opens fully visible, the mobile overflow and drawer fixes, and the drop-down menu positioning corrections — 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.

• Drop-down menus no longer appear open before you hover them. On some templates every sub-menu was drawn on the page from the moment it loaded. They are hidden again until you move the mouse over the menu.
• Drop-downs 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.

• 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 — Omega is now genuinely Joomla 6 native. This is by far the largest update Omega 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. Omega 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: Joomla 6 refuses to upgrade while that plugin is enabled, so a template that still needs it blocks the upgrade rather than merely misbehaving afterwards.
• 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. Previously every one of them was a plain text box you had to type a hex code into — the picker the template referenced was never actually loaded. 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 row of icons holding account, register, search and social links, each a comfortable 44 pixel tap target. Previously these were scattered text links pinned to opposite edges of the screen.
• Search on phones. There was previously no way to search at all on a phone. There is now a search button that opens a full-width search box with its own Submit button.
• Five current social networks — Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok and Discord — alongside the existing set, with X (formerly Twitter) correctly branded.

Changed

• Bootstrap 2 → Bootstrap 5. The template's entire layout framework has been migrated, and the Bootstrap 2 files no longer ship at all.
• Font Awesome 4 → 6.5.2, loaded from a maintained source. The old address had stopped serving the icon set entirely. Version 4 icon names still work.
• Google Fonts now load with a normal stylesheet link instead of a JavaScript loader, so text appears sooner and without a flash of the wrong font.
• The template no longer loads its own copy of jQuery 1.8.1 (released 2012). It was being downloaded on every page view and then discarded, because Joomla's own newer jQuery took precedence anyway.
• Slideshow arrows now stay visible on touch devices. They previously only appeared on mouse-hover, so on a phone or tablet there was no way to tell the slideshow could be advanced.
• Settings screen tidied. Tab names no longer end in the redundant word “Settings”, and the on/off toggles are now Joomla's own native switches.
• Pop-up windows (login and similar) rebuilt on Bootstrap 5 and properly centred.
• Footer copyright year rolled forward.

Fixed

• Desktop drop-down menus could not be reached. Moving the mouse from a top-level menu item down toward its drop-down closed the menu before you got there.
• The search button on phones was invisible — white text on a white button.
• The social links panel on phones opened as a tall vertical list instead of a single centred row of icons.
• The show/hide password control on the Login and Registration forms was an empty box, and the Previous / Next / First / Last pagination buttons were completely blank. Joomla's own icon set was not mapped to the icon font the template loads.
• Two-column blocks of custom HTML collapsed onto separate lines instead of sitting side by side.
• A missing font file was requested on every single page load (four failed requests per page) — a leftover reference to an icon font Joomla removed in version 4.
• The collapsible module style never worked. It was built on MooTools, a JavaScript library Joomla dropped after version 3, so assigning it produced a module that would not open — and in one case a PHP error that blanked the page.
• Right-to-left sites loaded a stylesheet that did not exist because of a filename mismatch, so RTL styling silently failed.
• Two JavaScript errors on the template's own settings screen in the Joomla administrator.
• The Favicon tab's instructions were squeezed into a narrow column; they now run across the full width and are far easier to read.
• Stylesheet updates could take up to 30 days to reach visitors because the template's stylesheets were served without a version marker. Any change you make to the template's colours or CSS is now visible immediately.

Removed

• Retired social networks — Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg, Blogger and MySpace, none of which still exist as link targets.
• Fourteen unused JavaScript files, including four abandoned jQuery plug-ins (Superfish, Supersubs, Backstretch and DropKick), the Bootstrap 2 framework, and Internet Explorer-era compatibility scripts. Smaller download, less to go wrong.
• Internet Explorer conditional code throughout the template.

Security

• Template settings are now escaped on output. Every value you can type into the template's options — site name, slogan, colours, dimensions, social links — is sanitised before it reaches the page, closing off a class of cross-site-scripting risk.
• Removed programming calls that Joomla no longer supports, including one that would have produced a fatal error on a modern PHP version.

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• Update - Template updated to Joomla 6.0.0
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• Minor Bugs fixed
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• Update - Template updated to Joomla 5.3.0
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• Minor Bugs fixed
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• Update - Template updated to Joomla 5.2.5
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• Security Fix - XSS Vunlnerabilities in Menu Override
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• Update - Template updated to Joomla 5
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• Minor Bugs fixed
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• Fixed - Template updated to be compatible with Joomla 5.0.2
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• Fixed - Template updated to be compatible with Joomla 4.2
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