Mambo – where it all started

Joomla is originated from a similar CMS product called Mambo in August 2005.  Before the popularity of Joomla and joomla templates, Mambo was a popular product at that time, and it was supported by thousands of core developers and end-users. However, the company which owned Mambo, Miro International Pty Ltd, decided to protect their interests in the product and trademarked Mambo. As per the company, this step was taken so that they could fund the project to keep it alive, and also protect it from possible lawsuits against them.

Disappointment of Mambo Programmers

Many programmers at Miro International Pty Ltd didn’t agree with this logic, mainly because it contradicted with the open source movement. All these disappointed programmers came together and decided to start a new project on their own. The name of the new project was not decided initially, but they started a new web site as a first step to announce their plans to thousands of Mambo users. The named the web site as “OpenSourceMatters.org. Through this web site, they targeted the users of Mambo, developers, Web site developers and almost the entire community of devoted Mambo consumers. This developer team was headed by Andrew Eddie (also called as  "MasterChief" by his colleagues).

An open letter to entire Mambo Community

Andrew took a bold step to wake up the Mambo users, and wrote an open letter to the entire community about events at Mambo and how those could affect the open source movement in general. It also stated that the direction where Mambo was headed contradicted sharply with its original agreements and values. This open letter appeared on the Mambo official website, mamboserver.com, in the public forum section along with an announcement of their further actions.

Beginning of Joomla

This open letter aroused many reactions from the Mambo community, often mixed. One thousand users joined the opensourcematters.org forum within one day. This was a record in the history of Mambo (Now Joomla) community. This clearly indicated that the users wanted to support open source initiative as against the steps taken by Mambo people.

Discussions soon started among the open source community about what is really an open source product. Everyone offered their own views, and the debate went on for several weeks. One thing was certain, people didn’t want words like copyright, trademark enter into open source products. Within two weeks after the opensourcematters.org was announced, a new development team was formed and the new product was named as Joomla – which means “all together” or “as a whole”. The development team was not small – there were around 3000 developers in the team, all committed to open source movement.

Joomla 1.0.0

The first version of Joomla was announced on 16 Sep 2007 as Joomla 1.0.0.  This was almost identical to Mambo version 4.5.2.3 which was the latest version at that time. The major changes were related to bug fixes and security level enhancements. It also supported all templates and plug-ins supported by Mambo. However, Joomla developers didn’t stop at this. They started rewriting the entire package in PHP5, and this was officially announced in 2006.

Joomla 1.5

This is the latest version of Joomla, with a third release candidate (RC3) announced in October 2007. The final version of Joomla 1.5 is expected in December 2007. It will be a complete rewrite of Joomla in PHP5, with many enhanced features.

Popularity: 1% [?]