One of the most popular and highly rated open source content management systems, Joomla! started out as a product from the split in the group of developers of the Mambo CMS in 2005 and has grown dramatically since then. With well over 2.5 million downloads, it is a popular CMS that allows Web users to manage content on their Web sites easily and professionally.

Joomla!’s recent garnering of awards has shows its success both in popularity and peer review. The Packt annual Open Source CMS Awards bestowed two awards upon Joomla! in 2009: First Runner Up in the Packt Hall of Fame award, and Second Runner Up in the Best Open Source PHP award. Packt, a British publishing company, has written or published 18 books on Joomla! and how to use the system to manage content successfully. It also has published numerous other books on other popular content management systems such as WordPress, Moodle, and Drupal, and is therefore well placed to determine who is doing well in Open Source CMS, and who isn’t.

Aside from this critical acclaim, Joomla! has also become well known due to the large number of varying sites that use it as their CMS. Such companies include: the restaurant IHOP, the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as well as newspapers and magazines such as Outdoor Photographer and the Tahoe World.

Aside from its product, Joomla! has a unique name, being one of the few organizations to feature an exclamation point (although Yahoo! made the punctuation fairly visible). The name Joomla! comes from the Swahili word Jumla, for “as a whole”. Joomla! was started by the core developers of Mambo CMS, who split with Mambo over concerns about Mambo’s direction. Joomla! 1.0.0 launched in 2005, to rave reviews, winning Packt awards in 2006 and 2007. Its most recent release was in November 2009 with Joomla! 1.5.15.