Major release — Oxygen is now genuinely Joomla 6 native. This is by far the largest update Oxygen 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 built from scratch, the settings screen has been modernised throughout, 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. Oxygen 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 afterwards. Seventy obsolete Joomla 3-era calls across eight files were rewritten to reach this point.
• A real mobile menu. The main menu now opens from a large, easy-to-tap button at the top right of the header and shows your actual menu structure as an accordion — sections with sub-pages expand and collapse with a clear plus/minus control, and opening one section closes the others. Previously the phone menu was a flattened list that rendered sub-pages as dash-prefixed text (- Using Extensions, -- Components) with no way to collapse anything.
• A utility row on phones — one evenly spaced row of controls sitting under the logo, holding the second-menu button, account, register and search, every target a proper 44×44 pixel touch size.
• A second menu button on phones, on every page. Oxygen's sidebar menu only appears on interior pages, so the button used to come and go — three controls on the home page, four elsewhere. It is now always present: on pages that have no sidebar menu the panel is built from your main menu's top level, which is the same set of links that menu shows anyway. Consistent controls get learned; controls that appear and disappear read as breakage.
• A working 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 the phone search field had no submit control 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.
• 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 on all 78 colour settings, with a live preview, brand swatches and an opacity slider. Values stay as ordinary hex codes, so anything you had set before still works.
• Modern social networks — Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Discord added, alongside X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo and RSS. Thirteen networks are now available.
• Font Awesome 6.5.2 with version-4 compatibility shims.
• Package-based distribution — Oxygen now installs as a package and registers with Joomla's own Update Manager, so future updates are offered to you in the administrator rather than downloaded by hand.

Changed

• Rebuilt on Bootstrap 5 (previously Bootstrap 2), with a compatibility layer that preserves the original Oxygen design while the underlying framework is fully modern.
• Social icons are now scalable glyphs rather than a fixed image. The old icons were slices of a single picture file, which is why they looked soft on high-resolution screens and why no new network could ever be added. They are now font glyphs in brand-coloured circles — crisp at any size, and noticeably easier to pick out against the footer photograph than the small flat icons they replace.
• Twitter is now X, with the current logo. Your existing Twitter link and its on/off setting carry over untouched.
• 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. All 32 of the old checkbox-style switches are gone.
• The settings tabs have been tidied. The repeated "Settings" suffix has been dropped and one over-long tab renamed, so the strip now reads Basic, Site Name & Slogan, Drop Down Menu, Header & Footer Custom Code, Built-in Slideshow and Theme — and fits on one line.
• 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 and keep their original labels, so your navigation is unchanged.
• The header's background-image panels are now handled by the template's own code instead of a jQuery plug-in.

Fixed

• On phones, none of the main menu's links could be tapped. The menu opened and looked correct, but the dimming layer behind it was sitting on top of the links rather than under them, so every tap landed on the shade instead. The menu was effectively decorative. Every panel in the template is now individually tap-tested.
• The whole header was invisible on tablets and phones. Bootstrap 5 renamed the class that keeps a fixed header above the page, so Oxygen's header — all 110 pixels of it, in the right place — was being painted underneath the slideshow.
• All 78 colour settings appeared as plain text boxes. The colour-picker library the template shipped with stopped running on modern Joomla, so instead of a picker you were faced with 78 blank fields expecting a hex code typed by hand.
• The template settings screen was throwing JavaScript errors on every load, from two long-dead scripts — one of them 78 colour-picker start-up commands hidden inside a text label, where nothing that searches for scripts would ever find them. Both are gone and the settings screen now reports no errors at all.
• Interior pages had uneven left and right margins on phones, with content bleeding off the left edge. This had been wrong since the previous release and was missed because every check had been run against the home page.
• The version number Joomla showed for Oxygen was from 2014. The record Joomla reads had never been refreshed since the Joomla 2.5 era, so the administrator reported a twelve-year-old version regardless of what you had installed.
• Five broken images on the sample-data category pages. They pointed at an administrator template that Joomla removed in version 3, so they had returned "not found" on every visit since that upgrade.
• The password show/hide button was an empty square on login and registration, and its replacement icon is now drawn with a properly centred pupil.
• The Previous / Next / First / Last pagination buttons could render blank on category lists, because Joomla 4 and later use icon names the template never mapped. All four now display correctly.
• Module columns stacked full-width instead of sitting side by side. A rule in the compatibility layer had been written so that it could never take effect — it had no chance of overriding Bootstrap's own column rule, despite a comment claiming otherwise.
• A twelve-pixel horizontal scroll on every phone page. Rows converted from the old grid carried spacing that the old framework never had, pushing the page wider than the screen.
• A featured-article layout could collapse every multi-column grid to a single stacked column.
• Colour and style changes could take up to a month to appear for visitors. The template's stylesheets carried no version marker, so a content delivery network kept serving an old copy long after the change was made. They now update immediately.
• 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.
• The Superfish and Supersubs menu scripts are no longer loaded, along with the Dropkick select-box script and a compatibility shim for a jQuery feature withdrawn in 2013. The drop-down menus are now handled by the template's own stylesheet and code.
• Internet Explorer conditional blocks and the related compatibility scripts.
• The obsolete legacy on/off switch controls in the template settings.
• The old JavaScript web-font loader.
• A dead advertisement for an icon library that no longer exists, still being requested on every administrator page load.

Security

• Output escaping applied throughout the template, so every place a template setting is 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 that camera.js depends on. Migrating the slideshow to a modern replacement is scheduled for a later release.