Joomla, the open source content management platform turned 5 today. According to a blog post, Joomla was born September 1, 2005 (forcing it to wait an extra year in my town to start Kindergarten). According to a blog post commemorating the big date, Joomla now runs 2.5 percent of the world's web properties. I'm not sure how they came up with that figure, but if it's true, it's an impressive feat to get from zero to 2.5 percent of the entire web in just five years.

It's even more impressive when you stop to consider that it's open source and completely community run. In fact, Joomla reports that more than 2300 developers have created over 5000 extensions for the open source web content management system. Joomla sites run the gamut from education and government to non-profits, health, news and media and many more.

As the post points out, Joomla is unique in that has no CEO. The main organization is run by Joomla.org. It's an example of open source at its best. That's not to say, however, that the journey has been without bumps. As Dee Ann LeBlanc reported on CMS Wire in 2009, in an article called The State of Joomla, the community had to work through a number of major issues and it didn't always go neatly or nicely.

But as LeBlanc wrote at the time, in spite of these problems and some predictions that it wouldn't survive, Joomla continued to grow, and this month it celebrates its fifth birthday. Happy Birthday, Joomla. 

For more information:
- see the Joomla blog post

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