2005–2007 Joomla was the outcome of a
fork of
Mambo on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was a trademark of Miro International Pvt. Ltd., which formed a
non-profit foundation with the stated purpose of funding the project and protecting it from lawsuits. The Joomla development team claimed that many of the provisions of the foundation structure violated previous agreements made by the elected Mambo Steering Committee, lacked the necessary consultation with key stakeholders, and included provisions that violated core
open source values. Joomla's original co-founders, Andrew Eddie, Brian Teeman, Johan Janssens, Jean-Marie Simonet,
et al., established Open Source Matters, Inc. (OSM) to distribute information to the software community. Project leader Eddie wrote a letter that appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com. Over a thousand people joined OpenSourceMatters.org within a day, most posting words of encouragement and support. Miro CEO Peter Lamont responded publicly to the development team in an article titled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy—20 Questions With Miro". This event created controversy within the
free software community about the definition of
open source. Forums of other open-source projects were active with postings about the actions of both sides. In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement, teams were reorganised, 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. The SFLC continues to provide legal guidance to the Joomla Project as one of OSM's partners. On August 18, Eddie called for community input to suggest a name for the project. The core team reserved the right to make the final naming decision and chose a name not suggested by the community. On September 22, the new name,
Joomla!, was announced. It is the
anglicised spelling of the
Swahili word , meaning "all together" or "as a whole," which also has a similar meaning in at least
Amharic,
Arabic,
Turkic languages and
Urdu. On September 26, the development team called for logo submissions from the community and invited the community to vote on the logo; the team announced the community's decision on September 29. Beginning in October 2005, guidelines covering branding, licensing, and use of the registered trademark were published.
2008–2011 On January 28, 2008, the first major revision to Joomla was announced: Joomla 1.5 was popular but criticised for its inflexible and limited approach to access control. Independently of the project, Andrew Eddie and Louis Landry created a company called JXtended to continue the development of
Control—an ACL component—that could integrate with Joomla 1.5. In July 2009, Eddie presented his ideas to the Joomla User Group Brisbane. In July 2009 of that year, the Joomla project announced a restructuring of its management: a new Joomla Leadership Team replacing the Core Team that had originally led the project. This redefined the role of the team leading the project and structured it more around community involvement in events, the
Google Summer of Code projects, and other activities; the intention of the new approach to team-building was also an effort to increase community participation in the development process instead of relying upon a small group of coders to do most of the work. According to
Google Trends, interest in Joomla peaked around the period 2009–2010. In January 2011—largely as the result of the collaboration between Eddie and Landry—a second major revision of Joomla was released: Joomla 1.6. Prior to the
stable release of Joomla 1.6, Eddie relinquished his roles on OSM's board and project leadership; Louis Landry announced his retirement from the project the following year. Following Eddie's departure in September 2011, OSM sought feedback from the community, including the possibility of constituting the governing body under a new name, to restructure the board's membership and project leadership.
Molajo In 2010, with preparations for Joomla 1.6 nearly completed, Amy Stephen, Klas Berlic, Marco Barbosa, Matt Thomas,
et al. started a project to
refactor the Joomla code. Code-named Molajo (an
anagram of Joomla), the group felt that the existing Joomla CMS hindered end-users and developers adopting Joomla because (a) the Joomla CMS did not offer a range of packages containing themed sets of web applications—like other CMS products had been doing for some time—and (b) the traditional MVC approach decreased developers' productivity in creating new components for Joomla. Community reaction to Molajo was mixed. Some commentators claimed that it was a fork of the Joomla CMS—a claim strongly rejected by Stephen—while others contended that its activities would undermine the future of the Joomla CMS. Against these headwinds, Molajo made its public debut at the J and Beyond conference in the Netherlands in 2011. Lacking support from OSM, an enthusiastic following from the Joomla community, and unable to progress beyond
pre-Alpha status, Molajo collapsed around the middle of 2015.
2012–2014 In January 2012, another major
revision was announced: Joomla 2.5 (essentially bringing together the two previous minor releases from the preceding year). Joomla 2.5 brought much sought-after enhancements, a new API making it easier for novice users, additional multilanguage capability and the ability for users to update with "one-click". Shortly after the release of Joomla 2.5, work was under way on Joomla 3.
x. Joomla 3.
x was focused on mobile-friendly websites on the front-end as well as a more intuitive back-end. With greater ease in site navigation and a more user-friendly means of editing Joomla site content, Joomla 3.
x became the most popular version of the CMS, eventually making all previous versions obsolete. In March 2014, after seeking community feedback and a submission from the Production Leadership Team, a newly constituted OSM board approved changing the licensing for the framework from
GPLv2 to
LGPL. Although the proposal only affected the licensing of the framework and not the CMS, the decision sparked a fierce debate within the community. In August 2014, the Joomla CMS development team released a
plan for new version releases. Towards the end of 2014—three years after calling for feedback about ways to reorganise the project Eddie, although no longer an active contributor to the project, argued that the code for Joomla 3.
x was "too fat and heavy to maintain with the current level of contribution"; he recommended
mothballing the current CMS series and developing a less cumbersome Joomla 4. Eddie went further to criticise OSM's
vision,
entrepreneurship, and
management of the project. Other commentators also expressed their opinion that OSM had become dysfunctional.
2015–2018 Criticism mounted about the plan Dionysopoulos disagreed with Eddie about the major cause of problems with Joomla 3.
x; it was Dionysopoulos' view that the cause of most problems with Joomla 3.
x lay within "the processes of Joomla! the organisation". Dionysopoulos' views gathered momentum within the community and led to the formation of the Joomla 4 working group (which later became the Joomla X working group). In March 2017, the project announced the retirement of Joomla 3 and unveiled its plans to develop Joomla 4. This effectively brought an end to the work of the Joomla X working group (although it would be another two years before that Joomla X working group's activity was placed in "archived" status). In an effort to improve the relationship with the community, the development team revised the 2014 plan and, in June 2018, produced a new roadmap with the expectation that Joomla 4.0 would be released in a stable form before the end of 2018. During the period 2017-2018, the developers created six alpha test releases for Joomla 4.
2019–2020 In January 2019, the developers released an updated plan revising previously announced estimated time frames; the roadmap was revised several times during 2020. Community concerns intensified about the handling of the Joomla project—two years after announcing plans to retire Joomla 3 (but having already released two minor versions with plans for a third)—and by the end of 2019, a further six alpha test releases of Joomla 4 were produced for public discussion. On one hand, some people questioned whether the community had lost its influence in driving the project, while, from the developers' viewpoint, the other side defended the project by observing that things would be more productive if the community had been more actively engaged in testing, rather than criticising, the alpha releases. These discussions revealed a growing sense of division between developers on one side and end users on the other. A lengthy debate that started in March 2019 and initially focused on the aesthetics and usability of the Joomla 4 backend interface highlighted an overall sense of disappointment with management and progress of the project. Although the debate was weighted heavily on criticising the backend aesthetics, people on all sides of the discussion aired their dissenting opinions about why the Joomla 4 project had become distracted by
feature creep,
software bloat, eventual
cost overrun and lack of trust. Against a background of unrelenting criticism from within the community and declining popular interest in Joomla at the time The conference identified several key areas for further work but basically accepted the premise that faults related mainly to the project's organisational framework rather than the quality of the product. On May 28, 2020, the Joomla team disclosed that a data breach had occurred that potentially affected 2,700 users by exposing their personal details. The incident was discovered by an internal audit of the website that also highlighted the presence of superuser accounts owned by individuals outside OSM. Although no evidence was found of any unauthorised access to personal information, action was immediately taken to mitigate the risk, including a requirement for all users to change their passwords. The
COVID-19 pandemic impacted Joomla's planned events, resulting in the cancellation of the main world-wide conferences. On 21 June 2020 OSM President Rowan Hoskyns Abrahall resigned citing personal difficulties. It later transpired that OSM Board had not been publicly forthcoming about matters relating to the several claims for reimbursement of Abrahall's expenses that were deemed to be outside OSM's financial policy and, further, that Abrahall now owed money to OSM; the matter received some independent coverage and analysis. This matter caused a chain of events: Abrahall declared bankruptcy in order to forfend her debt to OSM; Abrahall commenced defamation proceedings against OSM; Abrahall's successor, Brian Mitchell, was dismissed.
2021–present Following Mitchell's departure as President, OSM reorganised its board structure removing three of its director roles. The increasing use
social media—especially for
microblogging—impacted the uptake of CMS technology to build websites. The Joomla project also lost a significant part of its volunteer base as a result of an ageing population, continuing disillusionment about the future direction and a perceived absence of transparency about the board's activities. On 17 August 2021, Joomla version 4.0 was released (some six years after work had begun). This was a major milestone release for the Joomla project. In April 2022 Abrahall commenced defamation action against OSM; the case ended in March 2023 with the plaintiff voluntarily withdrawing her lawsuit. The Joomla 4 project did not live up to developers' expectations; work soon commenced on Joomla 5—released on 17 October 2023—in appearance, Joomla 4 with some of its legacy code removed. Joomla 5 uptake was slow (compared to previous releases) and user criticism further intensified. Joomla users had problems because their web hosting providers did not meet more restrictive minimum technical requirements; furthermore, upgrading from previous releases resulted in users having to forego their reliance on third-party extensions and rebuild their websites. Criticism was especially heaviest among third-party developers. To assist with the transition to Joomla 5 and upgrade challenges the project introduced a "backward compatibility plugin" in Joomla 5.0 as a temporary bridge, enabling many Joomla 4 extensions and templates to function while developers updated their code to the new framework. Implemented in a manner so it loaded before other plugins it provided aliasing for deprecated Joomla 4 classes; official guidance described it as an interim solution that would be phased out by Joomla 6, when legacy deprecations from Joomla 4 would be removed from the core and, if necessary, handled during that upgrade cycle. Joomla remained popular with its adherents but, as the continuing downward trend Joomla version 6 was released on 14 October 2025. ==Development and support ==