Joomla!

Joomla! is a free, open source content management system written with PHP for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets using a MySQL database. Joomla! includes features such as page caching to improve performance, web indexing, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, forums, polls, calendars, website searching, and language internationalization.

The name is a phonetic spelling of the Swahili word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole". It was chosen to reflect the commitment of the development team and community to the project. The first release of Joomla! (Joomla! 1.0.0) was announced on September 16, 2005. This was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. In the project's roadmap, the core developers say Joomla! 1.5 will be a completely re-written code base built with PHP 5.

The project site can be found at http://www.joomla.org/. An online demo of Joomla! can be found at http://demo.joomla.org/.

Joomla! is released under the GNU General Public License.
History

Joomla! came into being as the result of a fork of Mambo between Miro Corporation of Australia, the trademark holder of the Mambo name at that time, and all of the then core developers. The two groups parted ways on August 17, 2005. The Miro Corporation formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits. The development team claimed that many of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the elected Mambo Steering Committee, lacked the necessary consultation with key stake holders, and included provisions that violated core Open Source values.

The development team created a web site called OpenSourceMatters to distribute information to users, developers, web designers and the community in general. The project team leader, at the time, Andrew Eddie, also known as "MasterChief," wrote an Open Letter to the Community, which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com.
Open Source Matters logo
Open Source Matters logo

By the next day, 1000 people had joined the opensourcematters.org forum web site, most posting words of encouragement and support for the actions of the Development Team. The web site received a slashdotting and news articles regarding the event appeared at newsforge.com, eweek.com, and ZDnet.com. Miro CEO, Peter Lamont, gave a public response in an article entitled The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro.

This event has stirred deeply held feelings in the Open Source movement regarding what shall constitute "Open Source". Forums at many other open source projects were active with postings for and against the actions of both sides. Rumor and accusations of wrongdoing by Miro and the Mambo Foundation were rampant.

In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement, teams were reorganized, and the community continued to grow. On September 1, 2005 the new name was announced to a mixed reception of 3000+ faithful followers of the Development Team. This is a developing event.

[edit] Contents of Joomla!

The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which are built to be as modular as possible, allowing extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are the so called "Bots". Bots are background modules that, if enabled, will extend Joomla with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, will allow the author of Joomla content to use "Wikitags" in Joomla articles, which will autocreate dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed. Hundreds of 'extensions' for Joomla are also made available via Extensions Directory

[edit] Community

Joomla! maintains an active official and unofficial community. The official Joomla! forums claims 100,000 threads, over 500,000 posts from over 60,000 members in 40 languages.[1] Unofficial sites are published in many languages, often with Joomla! extensions that are region specific. For example, Bi-directional text support for the Hebrew and Arabic languages can be found on 3rd party community portals. Unofficial web developers also build extensions and web templates for commercial sale, in addition to offering freelance customization services.