Introducing Foundra 1.0.0 — a Joomla 6 template built for selling

There is a moment in every Joomla shop build where the software stops being the problem and the look starts. The catalogue is in, the payment method works, a test order lands in the inbox — and the store still looks like a content site with a cart bolted to the side. The product page is a stack of form controls. The checkout is a table. The account area is a list of links. Nothing is broken; nothing is a storefront either.

That gap is what Foundra is for, and today it has its first public release. Foundra is a Joomla 6 site template built specifically for Solidshop: every storefront view, every account screen, every checkout step and every layout underneath them has a template written for it here, designed for selling rather than adapted from an article view.

It is $49, one-time, for a single live domain, with twelve months of updates and support. The source is GPL-3, it runs on your own server, and there is no activation call, no telemetry and no platform taking a cut of what you sell.

Every Solidshop view has a template here

A Joomla template can style a shop in two ways. It can leave the component to render its own default markup and hope its typography and buttons carry the day — which is what most templates do — or it can ship an override for each view and lay the page out deliberately. Foundra does the second, for all of them:

• The product page, including the layouts the Downloadable and Service / Booking add-ons register, with its own media gallery, name, price, options and variant pickers, quantity stepper, custom fields, related products, share and wishlist controls.
• The listing — toolbar, product grid, pagination — and the product card that all three of those share with the storefront modules.
• Cart and checkout, including the mini-cart drawer, the address forms and saved-address lists for both guests and signed-in customers, the coupon form, the checkout policies, the promotion notices, the empty cart and the confirmation page.
• Every account page — overview, orders, order detail, addresses, profile, wishlist, invoices, downloads, bookings, reviews and subscriptions — behind one account sidebar. Order tracking and the invoice view come with it.

The account pages have a small trick worth mentioning. Several of them belong to add-ons: Invoices, Downloads, Bookings, Reviews, Subscriptions. When the matching add-on is not installed, Foundra does not render an empty table with a column of dashes — it shows a short notice explaining what that page would hold, with a link to the add-on through the Extensions tab that Core 1.5.0 added to the admin. A page that is empty because a feature is missing should say so.

Five presets, and the one you pick is the one that loads

A preset is a small stylesheet that restyles Foundra’s design tokens: the palette, the corner radius, the shadows, the spacing scale, the aspect ratio of the product picture. Choosing one moves no module and changes no content, and only the active preset’s stylesheet is ever sent to the browser.

• Default — blue and amber, comfortable radius, soft shadows, square product pictures that lift on hover. The safe choice for a general catalogue.
• Boutique — serif headings, purple and gold, portrait 3 : 4 product pictures, generous whitespace. Apparel, jewellery, homeware.
• Electronics — a dense four-column grid of square bordered cards, sky blue and orange, tight radius. Built for comparing specifications at a glance.
• Marketplace — green and amber, rounded cards and pill buttons, a filter sidebar with more presence. Broad catalogues with many brands.
• Minimal — monochrome, no radius, no shadows, two large pictures per row and the most whitespace of the five. Few products, big photography.

Each preset brings its own palette, and the Primary and Accent Colour options sit at the Default preset’s blue and amber. Leave them there and the preset you picked keeps its colours; change either one and your colour wins on every preset, with the lighter and darker tints derived from it. So the presets are a starting point rather than five boxes you have to live inside — pick the one whose proportions you like, then paint it.

The rest of the style options work the same way: font family (the visitor’s own system font, or the bundled self-hosted Inter — either way no request leaves for Google Fonts), two, three or four products per row, three product-card styles, three header styles including a transparent-over-hero one that turns solid on scroll, container width from 1140 px to fluid, a logo as image or wordmark with a separate dark-mode logo, a favicon and a back-to-top button.

Dark mode, four ways

Follow the visitor’s system setting, force light, force dark, or put a sun / moon toggle in the header and let the shopper decide — their choice is remembered in their browser.

Underneath, the dark theme is a second set of colour tokens applied on the root element rather than a separate stylesheet of overrides. That distinction is the reason it holds up: every surface reads its colour from the same tokens, so add-on screens, plugin-rendered order sections and third-party modules come along with it instead of staying stubbornly white in the middle of a dark page. The dark logo follows both the class and the media query.

The rest of the site, not just the shop

A store is never only its catalogue. It has an About page, a returns policy, a contact form, a blog, and the sign-in and password-reset screens every customer eventually meets. Those are Joomla’s views, not Solidshop’s — and on most commerce templates they look it: you get a beautiful product page and a Cassiopeia-shaped registration form two clicks later.

Foundra ships its own templates for them too: the single article and the category blog, the contact page, sign-in, logout, registration, password reminder, every step of password reset, the profile, and the Articles module you would use for a “From the blog” strip on the home page — which renders the same card the blog does. The error page keeps the header and the logo instead of dumping the visitor onto a bare Joomla screen, and the offline page is a single card with the logo, your message and the sign-in form.

One detail from that work is a good illustration of the whole template: Joomla’s article images carry physical pull-left / pull-right classes. Foundra maps them onto logical --start / --end equivalents, so an article’s picture sits on the reading-start side in Persian as well as in English, without anyone editing the article.

Layouts your modules can just pick

Core 1.5.0 added four storefront modules two days ago — a slideshow, category tiles, brand logos and recently viewed products. Foundra styles all of them, along with the mini-cart, the products module, the reviews module that Reviews 1.1.0 shipped yesterday, the language switcher, and Joomla’s own breadcrumbs and pagination.

It also contributes six extra layouts of its own, which appear in the module’s Layout dropdown with no override to write. For the slideshow: split (picture on one half, text on a plain surface on the other, stacking picture-first on a phone), centered (full-bleed photo, text in a narrower measure, arrows either side) and banner — a slim promotional strip to sit above a listing. For the category tiles: editorial (one large feature tile, the rest packed beside it), compact (a row of small round-cornered thumbnails for a sidebar, or plain chips with the picture off) and cards, which puts the name on a panel below the picture instead of over it — the one to reach for when your category photography is light or busy and an overlaid label is hard to read on it.

Every display option and the accessibility contract hold in all of them: one link per tile, and the decorative picture’s alt text left empty while the name is visible beside it, so a screen reader announces each tile once rather than twice.

Nineteen positions, and a page that follows them

Foundra defines nineteen module positions — banner, top, header, nav, breadcrumb, full-width, main-top, both sidebars, content top and bottom, main-bottom, a full-width footer row, four footer columns, a footer-bottom strip and a debug slot. Each renders only when it holds a published module, so an unused position costs nothing and leaves no gap in the page.

The two sidebars change the layout rather than just filling it: publish a module into either one and the page switches to a sidebar layout, into both and you get three columns. This is how the filters module ends up beside a listing without you configuring a thing about widths.

What it is not: framework-free, not Bootstrap-free

Foundra’s own templates are hand-written semantic HTML and modern CSS — custom properties, grid, logical properties, a small slice of vanilla JavaScript. There is no Tailwind, no utility framework, no build chain to learn before you can change a colour. Open a stylesheet, change a token, refresh.

What we will not claim is that Bootstrap is gone. Joomla ships Bootstrap and its own admin and site extensions render Bootstrap classes; a template that ripped it out would break the third-party extension you install next month. So Foundra re-skins it instead: pagination, forms, alerts, tabs, plugin-rendered order sections, review and booking fragments — all retokened onto Foundra’s palette, in both colour schemes. Foundra’s own markup uses none of it; everyone else’s keeps working and stops looking borrowed.

Right-to-left and accessibility, from the start

Foundra is built on CSS logical properties throughout, so margins, padding, borders and positioning mirror with the text direction rather than needing a second stylesheet. The slideshow and gallery arrows flip with them. If you sell in Arabic, Hebrew or Persian, the storefront reads correctly without a single override.

On the accessibility side: skip links to the content and to the search, translated landmark labels, a mobile menu that traps focus while it is open and closes on Escape, visible focus states everywhere, and animation that stands down under prefers-reduced-motion. The template’s own strings ship in 23 locales.

Customising it without forking it

Three levels, in increasing order of commitment.

Custom code slots live on their own tab in the style: inline CSS, inline JavaScript, raw head markup, body-start and body-end markup. They are stored in the style’s settings, which means a template update cannot overwrite them. Beside them, templates/foundra/css/custom.css and js/custom.js load automatically when present, with .dist starter files shipped for both.

Tokens are the level most people need and few templates offer. The compiled stylesheet reads its values from --foundra-* custom properties, so a handful of lines of custom CSS restyles the entire site at once — including dark mode, which is named by a class on the root element:

:root {
    --foundra-radius-md: 0.25rem;
    --foundra-space-10: 5rem;
}
:root.dark-mode {
    --foundra-primary: #2dd4bf;
}

A child template is the level for real layout surgery. Joomla’s Create Child Template button works out of the box: the child carries only the files you actually override — one copied product-card layout, say — and reads everything else from Foundra, so an update to the parent leaves your work alone. This is the answer to the oldest problem in Joomla templating, and it is worth using from day one rather than editing Foundra’s files directly and dreading the next update.

We are running it ourselves

The site you are reading this on runs on a customised Foundra — same files, same constraints, same update path we ship to you. The marketing pages, the documentation, the blog and the pricing tables are all it.

For the shop side, demo.solidshop.app is a full Solidshop store on Foundra with a real catalogue: browse the listings, open a product, add it to the cart, walk the checkout. It is the fastest way to decide whether the template is right for you before spending anything.

Requirements & availability

Foundra 1.0.0 needs Solidshop 1.5.0 or later, Joomla 6.0+ and PHP 8.4+. The core minimum is not arbitrary: 1.5.0 is the release that ships the four storefront modules Foundra styles and the extension catalogue its account pages link through. The installer checks it before anything is copied, and refuses with a plain message rather than a fatal error if the core is too old or missing. Updates arrive through Joomla’s own extension updater, and an update keeps your style settings, your custom code slots, your custom.css and any child template.

It is $49, one-time, for one live domain, with twelve months of updates and support and a private support ticket; renewals after that are 30% off. The licence is GPL-3 — what you buy is the download, the updates and the support, and the copy you have installed keeps working whatever you decide later.

The Foundra page has the screenshots — all five presets side by side, the product page, the cart drawer, checkout, the account area and the mobile layout — and every option is documented in the manual: options, presets, positions, what it overrides, and how to customise it.

If you are still assembling the store this template will dress, Core 1.5.0 is the release to read next: it gives you the home menu item and the modules to build a front page out of, and Foundra gives all of them somewhere to look right.