On September 1, we celebrated Joomla‘s 6th birthday. In September 2005, Joomla’s 20-odd founders forked the Mambo project and established Joomla. Six years later, Joomla is one of the three top open source content management systems in the world. The founders had no idea that Joomla would be so successful, but six years later, thousands of people all over the world make their living with Joomla, and millions more update a Joomla website every day.
Birthdays are a good time to think back to where we were. In 2005, where were you and what were you doing?
I came to Mambo in July 2005, when a web development firm hired me to build a site using it. I found it impossible to use, very confusing, and cumbersome, but I stuck with it. After 9 months of working with Mambo, and later Joomla, I started to think I might know a little bit about what I was doing. The learning curve was quite steep, and I spend much of my time trying to figure out ways around problems I had with customizing the system.
At the same time, I knew content management systems had always been the way to go with running and updating websites. They made so much sense for clients, and I hated working with Dreamweaver and Contribute. Joomla seemed like a good product, though lacking in documentation and usability, so I worked on ways to teach it and document it.
Now, six years later, Joomla’s community has produced some truly amazing websites, the system is tremendously flexible and customizeable, the documentation is everywhere, and usability is improving. We have a record number of Joomla Days scheduled for this year. And as Steve Burge points out in his post, some great stats to sell clients on Joomla:
- Over 500,000 forum users
- Over 25 million downloads of Joomla software — since 2007!
- Over 8000 Joomla extensions listed in the Joomla Extensions Directory
We have much to celebrate this month, so join your local Joomla User Group and celebrate six exciting years with Joomla!