redwood-dragon.com

Joomla! No, it is not a mistake, the name is written with an exclamation mark at the end, the same as Yahoo! The name Joomla! is loosely derived from the word "Jumla" with an English spelling. Jumla in Swahili means "all together" or "as a whole". [1]

Joomla! is a CMS, that is a Content Management System. A CMS can be loosely defined as a repository of data along with a collection of software procedures that help manage it.

Traditionally, web pages had the content and it's presentation mixed in the same file, usually written in HTML. This resulted in very big files and increased the difficulty of giving maintenance to them. As web design evolved, CSS were created to divide the look and formatting of pages from their contents.

A CMS goes even further, simplifying the structure of web pages by creating dynamic web pages[2]. The content is now in a database and it is retrieved and placed on a web page, styled by CSSs when a user requests it.

Joomla! CMS was created by the same Australian team that was developing a product called Mambo, another CMS that was released to the open source community in 2001. Some developers from Mambo decided to start this new project under a new non profit organisation called Open Source Matters (OSM).

Joomla! version 1.0.0 was released on September 16, 2005, and it was downloaded over 2 million times that year by all sorts of users. Since then it has won several awards, including the Packt award in 2006 and 2007.

The next version, Joomla 1.5 was released in late January 2008. The current release is version 1.5.20 (issued 18 July 2010). The Joomla! Community is now patiently waiting version 1.6.

Joomla! this very minute is being used all over the world for a wide variety of sites, from personal sites to community sites to business sites. "Joomla! is more than just software, it is people." [3]

[1],[3] Open Source Matters - Joomla! Main Descriptive Page

[2] Barrie North. Joomla 1.5: A User's Guide (Second ed.) pp. 2-7. ISBN-13: 978-0-13-701231-2