Joomla is the world’s second most popular free, open-source Content Management System on the internet, right after the great WordPress. Like most other top Content Management Systems, Joomla has also become a helpful assistant in managing and polishing data online on both small and big corporate sites, portals, blogs, personal pages, stores, and numerous other forums.
This CMS is written in PHP and uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MS SQL for data storage. According to the latest research, Joomla was downloaded more than 2,500,000 times from all around the globe during the very first year it was released.
Before we jump to the Joomla’s interesting history, let’s first talk about what Joomla is all about.
What is Joomla?
Joomla is an open-source Content Management System just like WordPress, which is designed to assist users in building websites, blogs, and other online applications without having a vast knowledge of coding and programming languages. The name Joomla was chosen after going through thousands of community suggestions. It is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word “Jumla,” which means “as a whole” or “all together.”
If you see Joomla’s logo on the top once again, you will see that it is made up of four J’s rotated and linked with each other, representing the community coming together as one single unit. The community of Joomla is vast – both the ecosystem of Joomla developers and its users provide products and services to the community.
What Can Be Done with Joomla Software?
The best thing about Joomla is that it provides enough functionality and features to power websites of all sizes and types. As already mentioned above, the platform is considered one of the most popular choices for developers all around the world for creating corporate websites or portals. In additional to that, you can also create online magazines, newspaper sites, e-commerce, online reservation site, blogs, publications, government applications, small business websites, organizational and non-profit websites, and more with Joomla.
History of Joomla
In the early 2000s, Miro International Pvt. Ltd. created a CMS and named it Mambo. It was a free tool released under the GPL license and was welcomed with open arms by users and enthusiasts from all around the world. Everything was going well with this Content Management System until 2005 when a dispute appeared with the committee concerning the copyrights. This was a disappointment for the Mambo team.
However, this dispute didn’t make the system disappear; instead, the platform was reborn as Joomla or what we call in a coder’s language – a fork. It was a new version of Mambo that was somehow different than it, which was released as Joomla 1.0 on September 22, 2005. In other words, Joomla 1.0 was nothing but Mambo 4.5.2, with a few extra functionalities.
During the next 24 months of rebranding, 14 different updates were released that had various changes and bug fixes. In 2006, 2007, and 2011, the project won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award.
The team worked day and night to improve Joomla and give something unique to the community. After three years of continuous research work and improvements, the Joomla team released the major update, Joomla 1.5. It offered an entirely new level of powers and features that the community of developers and users loved a lot! Joomla got its new API and transformed into an international system, having right-to-left languages and support for an extended set of characters.
The success for Joomla was just another turning point for the team as in 2008, Johan Janssens, the co-founder of Joomla, became the Most Valued Person (MVP).
The project got big, and what was just a fork started transforming into one of the most popular choices for a Content Management System. In July 2009, Joomla team announced a reconstructing of its management to boost efficiency and productivity. They replaced the Core Team that originally led the project with the Joomla Leadership Team.
This minor change redefined the role of the team leading the project, and they started participating in different events, the Google Summer of Code projects, and various other activities. This approach of team building was also an effort to increase the participation of the community in the development process rather than relying on a small group of coders to do most of the work.
Version History (Major Releases)
- Joomla 1.6
After the major release of Joomla 1.5, this next major release of Joomla 1.6 was made public on 10 January 2011. This update added access control lists, improved the admin user interface, got rid of Sections/ Categories/ Articles, and changed to only Categories / Articles.
- Joomla 2.5
Joomla 2.5 was released on 24 January 2012. It was officially referred to as the Joomla 2 branch. This update added Automatic Extension update notification, database support for databases other than MySQL, and improved core search functionality.
- Joomla 3.0
Joomla 3.0 was released on 27 December 2012. This version offered the most significant improvement – which was coming responsive by default. Due to this update, Joomla became the first major Content Management System to achieve it. Besides making the platform responsive by default, it introduced Twitter Bootstrap integration, PostgreSQL support, and a major overhaul of the admin interface to improve usability.
Other important updates:
- Joomla 3.1: released on April 24, 2013, this version offered several new features, including tagging.
- Joomla 3.2: released on November 6, 2013, this version offered highlighting Content Versioning.
- Joomla 3.3: released on April 30, 2014, this version featured improved password hashing and microdata.
- Joomla 3.4: released on February 24, 2015, this version offered improved security advancements, Google’s No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA, composer integration, and several new interesting features.
- Joomla 3.5: released on March 21, 2016, this version contained category item counter, drag & drop images feature, download system information, and insert modules in articles feature.
- Joomla 3.6: released on July 12, 2016, version 3.6 featured download subform field, improved UX, Menu type ACL, show all menu items option, improved Joomla updates, and categories on the fly.
- Joomla 3.7: released on April 25, 2017, this version added Custom Fields and cache systems and package/extension management, offered Improved Workflow,Backend Menu Manager, improved update system, Multilingual Associations Manager, and UX improvements.
- Joomla 3.8: released on September 19, 2017, this version featured improved Routing System, Installable & Multilingual Sample Data, Code Improvements, and Encryption Support.
- Joomla 3.9: released on October 30, 2018, this version provided users with a comprehensive ‘Privacy Tool Suite.’ It offered more than 250 improvements, which included both minor and major fixes.
Final Words
Joomla is a one-stop shop for all your website and content management needs. The best thing about opting for this platform is that you can have a wide range of third-party extensions to install in your system that can improve its functionality and features. With a Content Management System of such a scope, you have unlimited power to create a website of any size and shape or an online application just the way you want.