15th May 2026 - New OS Property version 6.5

What's New in OS Property 6.5

OS Property 6.5 delivers a focused set of performance improvements, display enhancements, and important bug fixes. This release makes listings load faster, improves address display options, modernizes the backend management interface, and removes two long-standing bugs that affected search and featured property management.

⚙️ Core Improvements

Optimized Theme Architecture
OS Property themes have been refactored to share common layout templates across listing pages and search result pages. Duplicate template files have been removed from all built-in themes (Default, Theme1, Theme2, Theme3, Theme Black, Blue). This reduces the total number of files in the package, lowers the installation footprint, and makes future theme maintenance simpler.

Faster Property Listings — Image Lazy Loading
The Default theme property listing now loads a maximum of 5 images per property card instead of all available photos. The first image loads immediately; images 2–5 are deferred using native browser lazy loading. This noticeably reduces initial page-load time on listings with many properties, especially on mobile connections.

Kenya Shilling Currency Added
Kenya Shilling (KES / Ksh) has been added to the OS Property currency list. This extends out-of-the-box support for property portals targeting the Kenyan market. The currency is available in the Currency management section of the OS Property backend.

Simplified Install Sample Data
The Install Sample Data wizard has been streamlined. The separate step that required uploading a photos.zip package has been removed. Sample data now installs in a single step — select the target location (country, state, city) and proceed. This eliminates a common point of confusion for new users.

🎨 Display Improvements

German-Style Address Format
A new address format option — "Address, Postcode City, Region, State" — has been added to the OS Property Address Format configuration. This format groups the postcode and city name together (e.g., 123 Main St, 10001 Berlin, Bavaria, Germany), which matches the standard address layout used in Germany and several other European countries.
✅ Backward-compatible — all existing saved configurations are unaffected.

Modernized Backend Properties Action Buttons
The action button group in the Backend → Properties management list has been completely redesigned:

• Approve / Unapprove toggle added per row
• Featured / Non-Featured toggle added per row
• Publish/Unpublish, Edit, and Delete remain available
• Buttons now use clean SVG icons with aria-label attributes for better accessibility
• Visual styling updated to a compact, consistent Bootstrap button cluster

Administrators can now approve and feature properties directly from the list without opening each property record.

Theme2: Property Address in Listings
Theme2's property listing and search result layouts now display the property address when the listing_show_address configuration option is enabled. This brings Theme2 into line with the behavior already present in Theme1 and Theme Black. The address is displayed between the property title and price, with a map-marker icon accent.

Quick Search Module — Mobile Dropdown
On the OS Property Quick Search (RealHomes) module, property-type selection on mobile devices now uses a dropdown select list instead of individual buttons. The buttons remain visible on desktop. On screens narrower than 600 px, the dropdown replaces the buttons and submits the search automatically on selection. This improves usability on touch screens where multiple small buttons are difficult to tap accurately.

OSP Slider and OSP Slideshow — No More jQuery
The OSP Slideshow module has been rebuilt using Vanilla JavaScript (no jQuery dependency). The new implementation replaces the old camera.js library with a lightweight, self-contained slideshow engine compatible with Joomla 4, 5, and 6. Transition effects and layout options have been upgraded as part of this change.

The OSP Slider module continues to provide property carousel functionality with support for lightbox display.

🐛 Bug Fixes

Fixed: Min Price Resets in Advanced Search Pagination
When a user set a minimum price of 0 in the Advanced Search price-range slider and navigated to page 2 or beyond, the slider incorrectly reverted to the configured default minimum (e.g., 100,000). This happened because:

• min_price=0 was omitted from pagination URL parameters.
• The slider initialization unconditionally replaced a 0 minimum with the config default, even when the user had explicitly chosen it.

Both issues are now fixed. The slider correctly preserves the user's selected price range across all pages of search results.

Fixed: Featured Status Toggle at Frontend
Clicking the Featured / Non-Featured toggle on a property in the frontend management listing was not updating the property's featured status. The action link was not passing the required cid[] parameter to the backend task handler. This has been corrected. The button now reliably toggles the featured status and reflects the new state immediately.

Fixed: OpenStreetMap Integration
Two classes of bugs in the OpenStreetMap integration have been resolved:

• Tile layer errors: All L.tileLayer() calls contained leftover Mapbox-specific options (id, zoom, maxZoom: 21) that caused tile 404 errors at deep zoom levels. Options have been corrected and attribution updated to the standard OpenStreetMap notice.
• Nominatim geocoding failures: Geocoding requests to the Nominatim API were being rejected or rate-limited because no User-Agent header was included. A valid User-Agent is now sent with every request, in line with the Nominatim usage policy.

📋 Upgrade Notes

• No database schema changes are required beyond the addition of the Kenya Shilling currency row (added automatically on install/update).
• The address format configuration is backward-compatible — no existing sites will see a change unless the new format is explicitly selected.
• Theme template changes are backward-compatible. Sites using custom child themes are not affected.
• The OSP Slideshow Vanilla JS rebuild replaces camera.js. If your site uses custom CSS targeting camera.js-specific class names, review those styles after upgrading.