Foreword
Joomla! is steeped in a rich and sometimes controversial history. During its tumultuous
start in August of 2005, no one could have imagined how far this little project would
stretch in terms of reach, nor could anyone have imagined how much it would grow in
terms of depth of participation and resources available to the community. I still vividly
remember the day I published the now famous “Open Letter to the Community” that
you find in Chapter 1 of this book. Those were uncertain times for the 19 founders and
hundred or so members of the forum team to leave comfortable surroundings and start
over with nothing but courage and raw determination.
Today, I am writing this foreword having just attended a 200-person-strong local con-
ference in San Jose, California, and my compatriot across the table is off to Italy to
address 700 at a similar event. These are but two of dozens of such events held all around
the world each year, on every continent (except Antarctica of course, but maybe one
day), to celebrate as a community this amazing thing called Joomla! The right words are
hard to find, but one is certainly appropriate: Wow!
Joomla!’s mission is “to provide a flexible platform for digital publishing and collabo-
ration.” To that end, and at the time of this writing, we have 64 official languages; hun-
dreds of professional service providers; over six-thousand (that we know about) Joomla!
extensions; thousands of template designs to choose from; and tens of millions of Web
sites deployed all around the world. Joomla! is arguably the easiest software program of
its type—both to use and to master. It has been designed both for the most basic user
and for the master artisan who wants to take a site beyond the normal limits of the core
download. Joomla! carries a legacy of a user interface with pleasing eye-candy and a
wide choice of the most beautiful templates available for any site-building system in the
world. Particularly close to my heart is our passion for continuing to improve the way in
which we deliver Joomla! to more and more people in their own languages.
All together by name and all together by nature, Joomla! (meaning “all together” in
Swahili) sought from the very beginning to ensure it would be free for the entire com-
munity at its founding and into the future. It was set up deliberately to ensure that no
one person could ever “own” Joomla!, a detail that gives Open Source Matters—the
Joomla! nonprofit—the freedom to provide stewardship in the best interests of the proj-
ect rather than a parent company’s bottom line. Combined with the two main project
leadership teams for software production and community management, Joomla! as a
whole has one of the most progressive and mature leadership structures of any open
source project.
Five years after its founding—and on the heels of both Microsoft and eBay becoming
collaborators and contributors to the Joomla! core source code—we begin another phase