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Happy 20th Anniversary

Happy 20th Anniversary

bilal ayadi k8Lp1IOsZt4 unsplashPhoto by Bilal Ayadi on Unsplash

 

Over two decades, the project has embodied three core values: freedom (open licensing and transparent governance), flexibility (a powerful extension ecosystem and robust templating), and innovation (modern architecture, accessibility, and performance improvements across major releases).

Looking Back

  • 2005: The community launches Joomla, establishing a vibrant new chapter for open-source CMS development.
  • 1.x–2.x: Rapid adoption, a growing extension directory, and a strong developer ecosystem.
  • 3.x: Responsive templates, improved UX, and a mature ACL framework become hallmarks of the platform.
  • 4.x–5.x: Accessibility-first design, performance gains, modern PHP standards, and streamlined workflows for administrators and developers.

The Community

Joomla’s success is powered by people—maintainers, extension developers, designers, translators, documentation teams, event organizers, and users worldwide. Their volunteer spirit and shared purpose have sustained the project’s momentum and quality for two decades.

Why Joomla Still Matters

  • Open and sustainable: Community-driven governance and transparent development.
  • Built-in power: Advanced ACL, multilingual support, and content workflows out of the box.
  • Extensible by design: Thousands of extensions and flexible templating for custom solutions.
  • Secure and performant: Ongoing security reviews, modern PHP standards, and performance enhancements.

Looking Ahead

As we celebrate 20 years, we also look to the future: continued improvements in usability, accessibility, and developer experience; deeper integration with modern tooling; and a renewed focus on performance and sustainability. The roadmap remains guided by real-world needs and the open-source ethos that has defined Joomla from the start.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed time, code, documentation, support, and inspiration. Joomla is more than software—it is a community that builds the web together.

Happy 20th Birthday, Joomla! Here’s to the next chapter.

DarkMode is the new Black - You can use CSS to override the Isis Template, and make it DarkMode

The dark mode is the new Black, and it keeps your eyes from getting light exhausting. And it also looks great in the browser. The Dark mode is not native in either Joomla 3 or Joomla 4 (as of my knowledge). But there is a solution if you don’t want to use a plugin for your browser. You can simply override the CSS with a custom.css file in the backend of Joomla. By default this is built into Joomla Core, you only need to add the file. Read how to do this here. 


If you want to protect your eyes against constraining, you may use dark mode as an override in the Joomla Isis template at the Backend.

Nowadays, you can get plugins for the browser that makes the browser to apply dark mode by default. However, this corrupts the look of your Backend. One of these is “Dark Mode for Google Chrome” I find this to be handy on several sites, but not on the Backend for Isis template. 

Backend Isis template override with CSS to make it in Dark Mode

There are some different ways to do this, you may only want the browser plugin override, but a better way to do this is to apply a CSS override in the “custom.css” file in Administrator template Isis.

How to apply the override?

To apply this override, you need to go into your Isis template. You can follow this tutorial for adding custom CSS to your Backend template.

Thanks to Alexsey, we will all be able to use this override from his GitHub page. 

 

There may be other solutions or overrides to apply, you can add an extension to do this in the JED, but I always find that Core works the best for these additions, It's also quite easy to apply. 

 

Comments wanted

- LET ME KNOW IF YOU KNOW ANY OTHER WAYS TO DO THIS IN THE COMMENTS BELOW -

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