October 2025 brought a new major Joomla version to the Joomla world. It's the sixth major version of this popular and award-winning content management system. This article will elaborate on the new features of Joomla 6, compared to the previous Joomla version.
Most of the enhancements are under the hood, allowing us to develop with Joomla better and to keep our websites secure and updated faster and easier.
Automatic Updates
The greatest new feature of Joomla 6 is the automatic updates. Powered by the TUF (The Update Framework) introduced earlier, this feature enables you to update your Joomla websites automatically to the latest version. So, Joomla will stay up-to-date and secure without a single click from the website owner. Finally, it's true! And such a relief for webmasters who are managing multiple Joomla websites.
This feature can be enabled or disabled from the Joomla Update component, and by default, it's enabled on initial Joomla 6 installation. However, if you are upgrading from Joomla 5, this feature will be disabled by default, so you must enable it. It's worth mentioning that automatic updates will work only on websites published on the Internet (on web hosting) and not on locally hosted development websites.
Backward Compatibility 6 Plugin
The Backward Compatibility plugin introduced in Joomla 4 allowed us to use extensions and templates that are not 100% compatible with Joomla and use classes and functions from previous Joomla versions (3.x and older). Only the websites that could work without this plugin enabled were 100% compatible with Joomla 4, and later Joomla 5.
With Joomla 5.4, the new Backward Compatibility 6 plugin is added, and in Joomla 5.4, it exists together with the old Backward Compatibility plugin. However, to upgrade to Joomla 6, you must ensure that your website can function without the old Backward Compatibility plugin and disable it before upgrading. We have upgraded the code of all our templates and extensions earlier to make the usage of this plugin unnecessary, as you can read in this post.
New Custom Fields
There are two new custom fields added to the custom fields collection in Joomla 6. It's the "notes" custom field for guiding the users and the "number" custom field with optional currency formatting
Other Enhancements
As we mentioned before, most of the new features are in the Joomla code, and although they are invisible for regular users, they are very important for keeping Joomla updated with modern developer practices.
However, there are also some features that you will notice just after the upgrade. One of them is nice CSS transitions in both backend Joomla templates. Also, the default frontend template (Cassiopeia) now comes with a child template and more styling options. Just to remind you, Joomla child templates are a great feature, and we already implemented it in all our Joomla templates.
Media Manager is now improved and shows all file types. The default Joomla editor is now TinyMCE 8. And there are more updates and enhancements, but for the details, you can read the official announcement.