Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that is used the world over to generate everything from simple personal home pages to complex corporate web sites.

Its predominant features are that it's simple to install, easy to use and very reliable. But, perhaps most importantly of all, it is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody.

Joomla!'s History

In 2001 the Australian Miro Corporation developed a CMS called Mambo. This was made universally available as open-source software to gurantee its global distribution and, as a result, to ensure its thorough testing.

One year later, Mambo was split in two: a commercial version called Mambo CMS, and an open-source version called Mambo Open Source (MOS).

In 2005 a further split occurred when Mambo's core development team, in an effort to preserve the software's open-source values, split from the non-profit organisation established by Miro which had been set up to finance the project. 

On 16 September that year, the software was re-branded to Joomla!, a phonetic spelling of the Swahili word "jumla" meaning "all together". Today, Joomla! is regarded by many as the best CMS in the world.

The Joomla! Community

Joomla!has been developed and maintained by a world-wide community of programmers. More here...individual effort...collaboration.... including the availability of several ready-made additional features (known as extensions) which can be added to your website as your business grows*.

As a result, the source code evolves as people improve it, adapt it and fix bugs. In addition, there is plenty of support for those using the product with now over 100,000 users signed up to its forum, placing it within the top ten Internet forum sites in the world.

* Some of these are not free, however, but come at a small cost