History Joomla

Joomla came into being as the result of a fork of Mambo by the development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pty Ltd, who formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits.[1] 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.[2]

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 Andrew Eddie, a.k.a. "MasterChief" wrote an open letter to the community[3] which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com.


A thousand people had joined the opensourcematters.org web site within a day, most posting words of encouragement and support and the web site received the slashdot effect as a result. Miro CEO Peter Lamont gave a public response to the development team in an article entitled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro".[4] This event created controversy within the free software community about the definition of "open source". Forums at many other open source projects were active with postings for and against the actions of both sides.

In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement, teams were re-organized and the community continued to grow. Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) assisted the Joomla core team beginning in August 2005, as indicated by Moglen's blog entry from that date and a related OSM announcement.[5][6] The SFLC continue to provide legal guidance to the Joomla project.[7]

On August 18 2005, Andrew Eddie called for community input on suggested names for the project. The core team indicated that it would make the final decision for the project name based on community input. The name the core team eventually chose was not on the list of suggested names provided by the community.

On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla", was announced, which is the English spelling of the Swahili (Arabic:جملة ,and Urdu: جملہ ) word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole" [8].

On September 7, 2005, the development team called for logo submissions from the community, invited the community to vote on the logo preferred, and announced the community's decision on September 22, 2005. Following the logo selection, brand guidelines, a brand manual, and set of logo resources were published on October 2, 2005 for the community's use.[9]
Joomla (Joomla 1.0.0) was released on September 16, 2005. It was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 which, itself, was combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. Joomla version 1.5 was released on January 22, 2008, a year after having won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007.[10][11]