What's new in Joomla 6.1?

Joomla 6.1 was released on 14 April 2026, officially. It's the first minor release in the 6.x series, and as you've come to expect from Joomla: no revolution, just a few enhancements that make the day-to-day management of a website a lot more pleasant. Especially if you build websites for customers who get to work with the backend themselves, there are a few innovations that you will definitely appreciate.

Below, I discuss the most important changes.

Spam protection is back: Proof-of-Work CAPTCHA

Anyone who has been working with Joomla for a while knows that spam protection had drifted away a bit in recent years. You had Google's ReCaptcha, but that requires an API key, an account, and Google cosily watches your visitors. Not ideal if you want to work privacy-friendly.

Joomla 6.1 introduces a Proof-of-Work CAPTCHA, and it works fundamentally differently. Instead of having the visitor point to an image or tick a checkbox, the visitor's browser silently solves a mathematical puzzle in the background. The visitor does not notice, no account or API key is needed, and you are not dependent on an external service recording your form traffic.

Whether this works as well as ReCaptcha against advanced spambots? We have yet to see that in practice. But for standard contact forms and registration forms, this is a great solution, and I think it is a good step towards more privacy by default in the Joomla core.

Workflow visually mapped: the Visual Workflow Editor

Joomla has had a workflow system for a while now that lets you link the publication status of articles to approval processes. Very handy for customers with an editorial team, where an author submits an article that then needs to be approved for publication by a managing editor.

The downside was always that you set up that workflow rather abstractly via lists and options, without being able to properly see how the whole thing worked. This has now been solved with the Visual Workflow Editor: an interactive diagram that shows how statuses and transitions are connected. You can see at a glance where an article is in the process and how the flow goes from draft to published.

Practically speaking, this makes explaining to customers a lot easier. A visual diagram is more appealing than a table of settings.

More media fields: audio, video and documents

Joomla has long had a Custom Fields system that allows you to attach extra fields to articles, contacts or other content. One such field type is the media field, which allowed you to add an image to a field.

Joomla 6.1 expands this with three new media field types: audio, video and documents. You can now also attach an mp3, an mp4 or a PDF to a content item in a custom field. For situations where you build structured content, such as a knowledge base with attachments, a podcast overview or a video library, this is a welcome addition. You don't need to install a separate extension for this.

Modules get version history and multilingual links

Articles already had version history in Joomla: you can look back at previous versions of an article and restore them if necessary. That system is now also available for modules. Useful if you modify a module and want to look back afterwards to see what was changed, or if a customer accidentally overwrote the content of a module.

In addition, multilingual links for modules have been added. On a multilingual website, you could already link articles to their translated versions in other languages. You can now set up the same link for modules. If you have a module in Dutch and an equivalent in English, you can now link them together, just as you are used to with articles.

Updating to Joomla 6.1

An update from Joomla 6.0 to 6.1 goes through the usual route: in the administrator environment via System > Update > Joomla. No backwards compatibility issues are to be expected. In principle, extensions that work on Joomla 6.0 will continue to run on 6.1.

Make sure you always make a backup (and test the backup!) before updating.

You can find the full list of changes in this release in the official GitHub milestone of Joomla 6.1.