An Australian company, Miro (http://www.miro.com.au), developed a CMS called Mambo in the year 2001. It made this system available as open-source software to test it and to ensure wider distribution. In the year 2002, the company split its Mambo product into a commercial and an open-source version. The commercial variant was called Mambo CMS, the open-source version Mambo Open Source or MOS for short. By the end of 2004 all parties involved had agreed that MOS could officially be called Mambo and that a successful future for the fastest developing CMS of its time would be jointly secured.

The advantages of the commercial version were primarily the increased security for companies and the fact that they had Miro, which also supported further development, as guidance.

The open-source version offered the advantage that it was free and that an enormous community of users and developers alike provided continuous enhancements. In addition, it was possible for enterprises to take Mambo as a base and to build their own solutions on top of it.

In order to secure the existence and the continued development of Mambo, there were deliberations on all sides in the course of the year 2005 to establish a foundation for the open-source version of Mambo. In the fall of 2005 the establishment of the Mambo Foundation was announced on the Mambo project page. After positive reactions during the first few hours it quickly became obvious that Miro in Australia had established the foundation and that the developer team had not been included into the plans for the incorporation. Heated discussions erupted in the forums of the community and the developer team wrapped itself in silence for a few days.

A short time thereafter a position was finally taken by the developing team and published on opensourcematters.org, announcing that it would be advised by the neutral Software Freedom Law Center (http://softwarefreedom.org/) and that it was planning the continued development of Mambo under its own responsibility. The prospect of an improved Mambo based on new source code immediately made its way into the forums.

Quickly, a war of the roses developed between the Miro-dominated Mambo Foundation that was all of a sudden without a development team, and the development team itself, which, of course, needed a new name for the split entity, and an inflamed international community of hundreds of thousands of users. The parties sometimes called each other names in blogs, forums, and the respective project pages.

Meanwhile, development of both projects continued. The fork was called Joomla!
The development team put great value on democratic rules. The new project needed a logo and therefore a contest was announced to the ‘new’ community. By that time, about 8,000 users had registered with the new forum. The Mambo Foundation soon thereafter introduced its new development team.

Version 1.0 of Joomla! was published on the 17th of September 2005.
Quickly many of the third-party developers, groups that had been developing Mambo components, switched the projects Simpleboard (today FireBoard), DOCman, and many others to Joomla! and therewith endorsed the trust in the new project. The prefix mos that had been used in so many variables and terms was quickly transformed to jos.

Two years after its foundation, Joomla! was one of the most popular open-source projects in the world. However, a lot of time was wasted in those two years on organizational trench warfare and intercultural misunderstandings due to the restructuring.

The Web 2.0 celebrated its victories. User-created content became more and more important. Second life and its virtual reality became world famous. The programming language Ruby and in particular Ruby on Rails was being used more and more to develop websites. Programming interfaces played an ever larger role.

Joomla 1.0x looked and looks a little old and gray in this company. It had not exhausted its developmental options, but users looked longingly at systems like Plone, Typo3, Drupal, and lot of others that did not have the problems that come with sheer size and reorganization and that were able to constantly incorporate new technologies into their projects.

For the past two years Joomla! version 1.0x has not really been expanded any further, but security updates with minor code changes have been released. A two-year waiting time for a new version is not good advertising for the project. Joomla! has often been declared dead and was frequently ridiculed during this time and derisive articles on the lines of How to ruin an amazing software project! appeared in the trade.

However, the project team has come through with Joomla! version 1.5. Now that everything has been discussed fully in forums, mailing lists, emails, and personal meetings, Joomla!’s future is now rosier than ever in my eyes.

On one hand, upgrading from version 1.0x to1.5x is going to take some effort, since there is no full downward compatibility due to the changed source code. However, on the other hand, this definitely launches Joomla! into the league of business-capable content management systems. The clever strategy of creating building blocks with Joomla! (Joomla! framework), with which developers can be part of the new developments, is going to pay dividends.
It is finally possible to choose various methods of authentication to create
barrier-free websites in various languages, and to take part in the Web 2.0 mashups wave that is clearly spilling into enterprises. The road to developing components in environments such as Eclipse is now open.

With its existing community, developer, and installation density, Joomla! will simply blanket many sectors of this market. Many hosting providers are already offering Joomla! pre-installed to their clients so that there will be no serious problems when upgrading from simpler websites.