Joomla Template Tutorial: Understanding the difference between our Template version and Helix Ultimate version

This is not an often question, but rarely some clients ask about compatibility between our templates and recent Joomla versions. Despite our description, some people need more confirmation and we decided to explain in detail the difference between our template version and Helix Ultimate template (the starter template we use for our templates) version.

Understanding the process

When we start developing the template, we use Helix Ultimate as a starter template. When writing this article, Helix Ultimate is currently version 2.1.2

What we do is replace that version number you see above with the version of our template. Usually we use 1.0, but for older Joomla templates (before version 4) we changed that to 2.0 or 2.0.x

This is the difference between our template version and Helix Ultimate starter version.

What may confuse you is when you make a Joomla update, the prechecker may see the template as incompatible. This is because Joomla is always looking for the latest Helix Ultimate number.

As you can notice from the above screenshot, Joomla prechecker says both Joomla 5.0.0 and Joomla 5.2.5 requires Helix Ultimate version 2.1.2, Despite Joomla 5.0.0 was released over 1 and a half years ago and Helix Ultimate 2.1.2 was released 1 month ago.

So to conclude, Joomla precheker will always look for the latest Helix Ultimate version and say that is the version compatible with it.

Does this mean other versions are not compatible?

No, Helix Ultimate's older versions will work with latest Joomla versions.

So are our templates compatible with the latest Joomla 5?

Of course. Version number is just a...number in the xml file. You can write any number you want there.

All our templates are compatible with the latest Joomla 5. We always focus on updating the files of our templates to meet the latest Joomla and php requirements.

So how do we update a website?

We already made an article on how to update from Joomla 4 to Joomla 5 (the steps are more or less the same), plus we explained in the documentation the steps on how to update. You can check the article here

Basically you check Acknowledge the warnings about potentially incompatible extensions and proceed with the update. and rest assured that the template will work fine.

But as always, we recommend you make a backup before you do any changes to your website.