History of Joomla

In 2000, the company named 'Miro' developed a proprietary based on a content management system which was called 'Mambo'. After a year, it was made free to the public under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Mambo quickly gained a lot of community support and enthusiasm in a short time. But in 2005, there was a controversy between the members of the coordination board of the Mambo Foundation. As a result, the birth of 'Joomla' took place on August 17, 2005. It can be considered as a fork of Mambo.

At the time of controversy between the members of the coordination board of Mambo Foundation, Mambo was the trademark of 'Miro International Pvt Ltd' initially. It formed a non-profit foundation, which had the purpose of funding the project and also protecting it from lawsuits. Due to the copyright dispute of controversy with the Mambo Steering Committee, most of the members from the Mambo Core Team resigned. They declined to cooperate, saying that the new rules and standards violated the previous agreements approved by Mambo Steering Committee. The result was the creation of new entities called Open Source Matters and a code fork of Mambo called 'Joomla'. Joomla developers started a website "opensourcematters.org (OSM), which was used to distribute the information to the software community. This group included Joomla project leader, Andrew Eddie, and some other developers who broke their professional contacts with Miro and quitted Mambo. Over one thousand people joined the OSM within a day, and the teams were re-organized. Joomla is taken from the phonetic spelling of the Swahili word "jumla", which means "all together". The first version of Joomla was officially released with version 1.0 on September 22, 2005. The first version was released as a rebranding with a few bug fixes. The team finalized the logo for Joomla on September 29, 2005, as per the voting by the community members.

The first major version of Joomla (Version 1.5) was announced on January 21, 2008. With this update, Joomla got an all-new level of power and features to the open-source CMS world. Joomla also got some API, which helped it to become a truly international CMS. It also had support for extended character sets and right-to-left languages. In 2009, the Joomla Project announced a restructuring of its management to increase productivity and efficiency. There were several awards dedicated to the developers of Joomla. Firstly, Joomla won the Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Award in 2006, 2007, and 2011. Later, one of the developers, Johan Janssens, was announced to be the most valued person, according to PACKT publishing in 2008. Then, the same award was announced to Louis Landry in 2009. On April 25, 2014, Joomla Production Leadership Team announced the 'Semantic Versioning Scheme' for the new Joomla builds. After, the earlier LTS (Long Term Support) and STS (Short Term Support) lifecycle were not observed. Joomla version 3.3.1 was the first build under the new development strategy.

Note: The Joomla version used in this tutorial is 3.3.12.

Nowadays, Joomla is one of the most popular systems used to design software and content management. It meets the requirements of working for the improvement of IT and the distribution of information to every corner of our planet.