From Mambo to Joomla!

Joomla! is the second largest open source Content Management System after WordPress. Joomla! is intended to help those who don’t know programming build websites. It’s written in the coding language PHP and it uses MySQL, MS SQL and PostgreSQL to store data.

You can use the Joomla system for websites of all sizes. Joomla sets no limitation to the type op website either. You can build and power everything from e-commerce sites, magazines and blog sites to booking sites and governmental applications. 

In the official Joomla! Extension Directory you can find more than thousands of ad-ons free of charge that will improve your work.

When Mambo forked into Joomla!

20 years ago, in 2000, an Australian company named Miro (which is defunct today) developed a proprietary Content Management System called Mambo to which the public was allowed access a year later. 

At first, things went slow but a year or so later, Mambo’s popularity began to increase.

In 2005, however, the story takes a turn. Disagreement arose within the board of the Mambo Foundation. The dispute concerned a copywrite issue. As a result, a team of developers and engineers developed a new system based on the Mambo open source code, and that became the code fork Joomla!. The Mambo Foundation Open Source developers also started their own foundation called Open Source Matters. 

In a 2010 interview with Computerworld, Joomla project leader Andrew Eddie explains that Miro wanted the system to be commercial. Initially Mambo was supposed to be an open source system, and when it gained popularity, they would roll back the open source version and charge money for access. 

Eventually the system did become popular. In the interview, Eddie, who was then a part of the Mambo developer team, goes on to explain that Australia-based company Miro simply didn’t understand the workings of open source and its community. Miro wanted to run Mambo in a way that just ran counter to the wishes of the open source community. 

So, a split between Mambo and Joomla was inevitable. And within a year, the size of the Joomla! community had surpassed that of the Mambo community. 

Version 1.0 Joomla officially marked the birth of Joomla! in September of 2005 

Three years later, Joomla announced the first big revision, version 1.5. With this new version full of new features and powers, Joomla became an international content management system with a brand-new API. 

Why the name Joomla?

The name Joomla is the result of several community suggestions. 

The word Joomla is a reinvention of the Swahili word ‘Jumla’, which means all together. The open source theme and the roots of the name can be seen in the logo where 4 Js in different colors are interlinked to symbolize community.