Added

Bootstrap 5 compatibility layer

• New css/bs2-bs5-bridge.css: maps Simplex’s Bootstrap 2 grid (.row-fluid, .spanN, offsets, hidden-phone / visible-phone utilities, buttons, forms and the modal shell) onto Joomla’s bundled Bootstrap 5. It loads after the template’s own stylesheets, with a file-time version marker, so it sits in the right place in the cascade.
• The bridge also maps Joomla’s own icon-* classes onto Font Awesome 6, so the password show/hide button and the pagination arrows draw real icons.
• New js/cs-jq-compat.js: restores three jQuery 1.x calls that Joomla’s jQuery 3 removed but the bundled slideshow and parallax scripts still use (.live(), .offset() on the window, and .load(fn) as a load-event shortcut). The camera slideshow’s play/stop controls and the stellar parallax bands work again.

Phone layout

• New js/cs-mobile.js: on phones (up to 767 px) Simplex gets a compact header with a 44×44 px Menu button that opens a slide-out menu built from the site’s menus. Submenus open in place with their own arrow buttons.
• A phone toolbar under the header with five 44×44 px buttons: Section menu, Log in, Register, Search and Follow us (the social links).
• On phones the header, slideshow and coloured bands run edge to edge (cs-no-bs2-gutter body class), and the page cannot be pushed sideways.
• Text in the top modules band, the “Meet the team” band, the Testimonials heading and the footer keeps a 20 px side margin on phones instead of starting at the screen edge; the band backgrounds stay full width.
• On account pages (login, registration, password reset, username reminder), phones show the page content first, with only the breadcrumbs and a menu above it.
• Joomla’s page-number bar wraps onto a second line on phones instead of running off the screen.

Own error pages

• New error.php: “page not found” (404), “access denied” (403) and the other 4xx pages are shown inside the template, with its header, menus, phone toolbar and footer, instead of Joomla’s bare error page. On phones the message comes first. Server errors (5xx) still use Joomla’s minimal system page, because the database or a module may be what failed.
• The error page uses the template’s default style, so a home-page style that hides the main content cannot hide the error message, and it is marked noindex for search engines.

Colour picker

• New custom field fields/colorpicker.php with the bundled Coloris picker (js/coloris.min.js, css/coloris.min.css). All 20 colour settings (e.g. sitenamecolor, slogancolor) are now type="colorpicker", with a live swatch and a picker that ships with the template.
• New fields/adminui.php: a hidden field that styles the template’s Options screen only: help banners run across the full width instead of a narrow column, and the template’s Details panel follows Joomla’s light or dark admin theme.

Favicon tool

• New Favicon tab (fieldset faviconsettings) with a media field (favicon) and a favicon tool (fields/favicontool.php) that builds the favicon set from one image.
• index.php outputs the favicon links (32, 192 and 512 px icons and a 180 px Apple touch icon) through two new helpers, phFaviconSet() and phIcoBytes().
• 10 new language strings in en-GB.tpl_simplex.ini (74 → 84), e.g. TPL_SIMPLEX_FAVICON_TAB, TPL_SIMPLEX_FAVICON_LABEL, TPL_SIMPLEX_FAVICONTOOL_CREATE.

Modern social network support

• Five new social services, each with an on/off switch and a URL field: Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord (fields threads/threadsON … discord/discordON).
• The Twitter setting is now labelled X (formerly Twitter) and draws the X logo.
• All 13 icons (X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Pinterest, Discord, RSS) are now Font Awesome 6 brand glyphs (fab fa-x-twitter, fab fa-bluesky…) instead of the old socicon-* icon font, and each link carries a title.

Custom CSS that survives updates

• New Custom CSS setting (customcss, under Header & Footer Custom Code). It is stored in the database, so a template update never touches it.
• For larger stylesheets, create css/custom.css: it is loaded only if it exists and is deliberately not part of the package, so an update cannot overwrite or remove it. Both are loaded after the template’s own stylesheets and the bridge, so your rules win.

Security helpers

• 13 new helper functions in index.php: phEsc(), phHexColor(), phCssDim(), phCssNum(), phCssFont(), phCssSelector(), phCssToken(), phCssUrl(), phJsStr(), phJsLit(), phRichText(), phFaviconSet(), phIcoBytes(), plus phCB() for stylesheet version markers. The CSS and JavaScript helpers are also defined in component.php. Together they are used at 299 call sites. Details under Security.

Changed

Joomla 6 platform

• Built for Joomla 6.2.0.
• The template renders on Joomla’s bundled Bootstrap 5 (/media/vendor/bootstrap/, plus bootstrap.rtl.min.css for right-to-left sites) through css/bs2-bs5-bridge.css, instead of the template’s own Bootstrap 2 copy (bootstrap.min.css, bootstrap-responsive.min.css, bootstrap-extended.css).
• The login dialog uses Bootstrap 5 markup: modal fade with modal-dialog modal-dialog-centered and modal-content, opened with data-bs-toggle / data-bs-target and closed with data-bs-dismiss buttons, in place of the Bootstrap 2 shell and its inline jQuery onclick handlers.
• templateDetails.xml version 30.06.2025 5.3.0 → 6.2.0 (creation date 2026-10-15); the Options screen shows Template Version: 6.2.0 (2026-10-15). method="upgrade" kept, so an existing install updates in place.

J3 → J6 API migration

• All 94 Joomla 3 static calls removed (JFactory → Factory, JText → Text, JHtml → HTMLHelper, JRoute → Route, JURI → Uri, JError::raiseWarning() → throw new \Exception(), and the rest). These aliases exist only while Joomla’s Behaviour – Backward Compatibility plugin is enabled, and not at all in Joomla 6.
• Files converted (calls before → after): index.php 37 → 0, html/mod_login/default.php 20 → 0, error.php 13 → 0, component.php 2 → 0, html/mod_menu/default.php 2 → 0, html/mod_search/default.php 1 → 0. The other 19 were in the K2 slider override, which was removed (see Removed).
• In all, 16 of the 17 PHP overrides under html/ were modified.

Template Options screen

• 76 field type changes in templateDetails.xml. The 60 legacy class="switch" checkboxes are gone; settings such as RSSON, H1TitleImgText, OverrideDefaultSettings, AdditionalGFontON and cam_autoAdvance now use Joomla’s native on/off switchers (61 in all). The 20 colour settings changed from color to colorpicker.
• Fields 293 → 300, fieldsets 11 → 12. Tab names no longer end in “Settings” (Theme, Color, Drop Down Menus, Built-in Slideshow, Testimonials Slider, Side Pop Up Box, EU Cookie Law Window, Header & Footer Custom Code).

Fonts and icons

• The Google Fonts WebFontConfig JavaScript loader is replaced by a direct font stylesheet link with preconnect hints, in both index.php and component.php (WebFontConfig 2 → 0; webfont.js no longer loaded).
• The front end loads Font Awesome 6.5.2 (all.min.css) with v4-shims.min.css, instead of Font Awesome 4.7.0 from the shut-down MaxCDN, so the template’s existing fa fa-* markup keeps working.

Menus and background without old jQuery plug-ins

• Drop-down menus open on hover through CSS, without the Superfish/Supersubs plug-ins.
• Background images are sized with CSS background-size: cover instead of Backstretch.
• Neither script is loaded any more. jQuery itself still loads for the camera slideshow, the stellar parallax bands, the Slick testimonials slider and the other bundled scripts.

Stylesheets

• Local stylesheet links carry a version marker, so style changes show straight after an update instead of waiting for visitors’ browser caches to expire.
• css/template.css, css/template-rtl.css and the six colour presets (css/presets/style1.css … style6.css) updated.

Fixed

• Every “page not found” returned a server error when Joomla’s backward-compatibility plugin was off, and always on Joomla 6. error.php used JError::raiseWarning() and JText; it now uses the Joomla 4+ API. The old error page also linked stylesheets that do not exist in the template (reset.css, text.css, typography.css, presets/style-error.css).
• The password reset, login and username reminder forms did not show when they had no menu item of their own: such pages borrow the home menu item, whose “Home Page” style hides #story-content. index.php now shows the content on those pages.
• Drop-down menus closed before the mouse reached them. Moving from a menu heading down to its drop-down crossed a gap where neither was hovered. The gap is now bridged; the menu’s spacing and appearance are unchanged.
• “Create an account” in the login module led to a missing page. html/mod_login/default.php linked VirtueMart’s account page, but Simplex is not a shop template. It now links Joomla’s registration page, and VirtueMart’s only when VirtueMart is installed.
• The colour settings were plain text boxes on the Options screen, so a colour could only be changed by typing its hex code. All 20 now have the colour picker.
• The slideshow’s play/stop controls and the parallax bands had stopped working under the jQuery 3 that Joomla 5 and 6 ship. Fixed by js/cs-jq-compat.js (see Added).
• Fixes from a maintenance pass across our templates:
  • The @font-face in css/template.css pointing at the removed media/jui/fonts/ IcoMoon font is disabled; it caused four 404s on every page.
  • Pagination arrows (Previous / Next / First / Last) and the password show/hide eye use icon classes that Joomla 4+ emits and the old stylesheets did not cover; they are now mapped to Font Awesome 6 icons.
  • Featured-article intro text is no longer clipped to its title (.blog-featured).
  • The search button sits flush with its search box again (#search-position .btn).
  With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose Expression bug report led to this maintenance pass across our templates.

Removed

Bootstrap 2 copy and Internet Explorer support

• The template’s own Bootstrap 2 files: css/bootstrap/bootstrap.css, bootstrap.min.css, bootstrap-responsive.css, bootstrap-responsive.min.css, bootstrap-extended.css, bootstrap-rtl.css, bootstrap-tooltip-extended.css, and the archive css/bootstrap.zip.
• The Internet Explorer stylesheets css/ie.css and css/ie6.css, and the three IE conditional comments in index.php.

Legacy scripts and stylesheets no longer loaded

• Scripts: superfish.js, supersubs.js, jquery.backstretch.min.js, jquery.mobile.customized.min.js, modernizr.js, selectivizr-min.js, the html5.js shim and webfont.js. The first six files remain in js/ but nothing loads them.
• Stylesheets: the Bootstrap 2 files above, ie.css, ie6.css, the MaxCDN font-awesome.min.css, and the error page’s reset.css, text.css, typography.css and style-error.css.

Old admin script and unused files

• utils/admin-js.js, a Joomla 3 admin script loaded by the Options screen.
• html/mod_k2_content/ (Slider/default.php and its index.html files), an override for K2, which the template does not use and which does not run on Joomla 6.
• html/mod_menu.zip, an archive left inside the overrides folder.

Retired social services

• Four social slots removed with their switches: Google+ (gplus), StumbleUpon, Digg, Blogger.

Security

• Every template setting written into the page is escaped for where it appears, through the new helpers (293 call sites in index.php, the rest in component.php):
  • phEsc() for HTML text and attributes (98).
  • phHexColor() for colours (45).
  • phCssToken(), phCssUrl(), phCssNum(), phCssDim(), phCssFont() and phCssSelector() for values inside inline <style> (105).
  • phJsStr() and phJsLit() for values inside inline JavaScript (27).
• Site-title fields (H1Title / H2Title) go through phRichText(): formatting markup is kept, but scripts, styles, iframes and on* event handlers are stripped.
• Logo image alt text built with strip_tags() did not escape quotes; the 3 occurrences in index.php are now escaped.
• Social links: the addresses of the 13 network links and the five custom social links (customSoc1 … customSoc5) are escaped, and all 18 open with rel="noopener".
• The error page escapes the error message it prints.
• Module, menu and tab titles are escaped, including the login dialog’s title. htmlspecialchars/escape calls across the template rose from 6 to 51: html/modules.php 2 → 17, the testimonial chrome 1 → 6, html/mod_custom/default.php 0 → 4, html/mod_login/default.php 2 → 4, the megamenu, parallax and vmtab chromes 0 → 2 each, vmdefault 1 → 2, and fadeFromRight, slides, vmdefaultlogin and html/mod_menu/default.php 0 → 1 each.

Quickstart Installer

The Quickstart is a complete Joomla 6.2.0 site with Simplex installed as the active template, with the demo content. It is now a standard Joomla installation package (simplex-quickstart-J6.2.0.zip, installed through Joomla’s own web installer) instead of an Akeeba .jpa archive with Kickstart.

• Bundled extensions: Joomla 6.2.0, Akeeba Backup 10.4.0, Weblinks 5.1.0, MCP For J 2.8.3, StageIt 5.7.3.
• The templates/ folder holds cassiopeia, cassiopeia_extended, simplex and system.
• No VirtueMart leftovers: the demo carried 64 VirtueMart tables, two hidden VirtueMart menu items, plugins/vm* stub folders and the libraries/tcpdf library that only VirtueMart used. All are gone.
• The REGISTER button in the “Why it’s worth to register an account?” module opens Joomla’s registration page instead of a VirtueMart account page that did not exist.
• Joomla’s “What’s New” guided tours for 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2 no longer start by themselves (autostart = 0).
• Joomla’s Statistics plugin is set to never send data.
• A clean starting state: the action log is empty, there are no “changes found” template-override notices and no cached update rows, and the post-install messages are trimmed to the five worth keeping (welcome, privacy, multi-factor authentication, action logging, automated updates).

Package format

• Standalone template: Simplex now installs as a Joomla package (pkg_simplex-6.2.0.zip, manifest pkg_simplex.xml) that installs and registers the simplex template extension. It declares method="upgrade", so an existing Simplex updates in place, and <blockChildUninstall>true</blockChildUninstall>, so the template is removed through the package rather than on its own.
• Quickstart bundle: simplex-quickstart-J6.2.0.zip, a complete Joomla 6.2.0 install with Simplex pre-loaded as the active template.