This Year We Celebrate Together 20years of Open Source Achievements

It is Joomla’s 20th Birthday, and I am utterly honoured to serve as Joomla’s President at this pivotal moment in our history. For this reason, I would like to express my enthusiasm for everything we have accomplished and share my optimism for the decades yet to come. With this in mind, let’s take a look back together to see how much we have achieved in these twenty years.  

How Everything Started: When a Fork Became a Force

On the 17th of August 2005, a group of idealistic developers announced a fork of the Mambo CMS to ensure the project remained truly open‑source. Less than two weeks later, on the 1st of September 2005, the newborn project received its name: Joomla!, derived from the Swahili word “Jumla” (which means “all together”). Barely three weeks after that, Joomla 1.0 shipped, on the 22nd of September 2005, paving the ground for one of the web’s most enduring community‑driven platforms.

Twenty Years in Twenty Seconds

Let’s take a brief look at some of our significant milestones:

These pivotal moments are mere segments of the hundreds of minor and major releases, security and bug fixes, numerous Pizza‑Bugs‑&‑Fun events, Google Summer of Code projects, JoomlaDays, and countless late‑night sprint sessions that made everything possible.

Joomla Now: We Are Stronger Than Ever

Today, the current Joomla 5 series continues to receive rapid, incremental care, ensuring sites stay secure while benefiting from quality‑of‑life updates like improved MIME handling and streamlined scheduled tasks.

Meanwhile, alpha builds of Joomla 6.0 (Alpha 3 landed on 22 July 2025) are available for adventurous testers. Highlights so far include universal media thumbnails, richer batch editing, fresh date/datetime fields, and a hefty haul of under‑the‑hood refactors that pave the way for future innovation. The final release is set for the 14th of October 2025.

Joomla: The People Behind the Code

Volunteers are the core and heart of Joomla. Everything Joomla has been donated by volunteers: every line committed, bug squashed, documentation page translated, or event organised. Joomla’s resilience is proof that an open governance model, transparent leadership and a welcoming culture can compete with, and often outperform, big‑budget proprietary rivals.

20 Ways to Join the Party

You want to take part but are not sure how to mark the occasion? The July issue of JCM presented twenty creative ideas, from baking a four‑colour Joomla cake to hosting an open JUG or running a Why I Love Joomla video series. Pick one (or invent your own) and share it on social media with the #Joomla20 hashtag. You can get inspiration about spreading the Joomla Love from one of the founders of Joomla, Brian Teeman.

Do you need swag or branding assets? Grab the official “20 Years Together” logo pack or order limited‑edition merch from the anniversary shop, or join one of our Birthday week events!

Looking Forward: The CMS

Joomla is entering its third decade, and the roadmap points to nextgen PHP (continued cleanup of legacy code paths and tighter type safety,) API‑first flexibility (a strengthened web‑services layer for headless and decoupled builds,) Accessibility leadership ( WCAG 2.2 AA compliance baked into both core and default templates,) Ecosystem growth (new onboarding flows, guided tours, and revamped developer documentation that lower the barrier to contribution.)

None of this can happen without fresh voices. So, whether you are a designer, developer, writer, marketer or translator, there is a team in Joomla that needs you, and also the Joomla Community Magazine (JCM) is always eager for new authors.

Thank You, Joomla Community

Every contribution in Joomla tells the story of a community that chooses collaboration over competition from the very first forum post in August 2005 to the thousands of pull requests merged this year.

And I love serving as President of this community because I get to get a front‑row seat to the best of open source, every single day. In my community, I see generosity disguised as code reviews; I see patience expressed through documentation; I see courage when a newcomer opens their first issue; and I see creativity when teams bridge time zones to ship a release that makes the web better for everyone.

How could I not be proud, when every time I think of Joomla I see the maintainer who is working until late at night after putting kids to bed; the translator who is changing a string into a welcome word for the users on the other side of the world; the accessibility team who nudge us to go the extra mile; the organiser of a JUG taking out chairs for people they haven’t met yet; the sponsors who provide hosting, bandwidth, and pizzas quietly, the mentor who guides a student during their first sprint; and the moderator who makes sure our spaces are safe and kind. These simple acts combined have built an extrordinary community which I am proud to be the President of.

My beloved volunteers, each and every one of you, helped turn a CMS into a classroom, a playground, and a family. Because of you, millions of websites, large and small, commercial and charitable, have a rock‑solid, open platform on which they can grow.

I invite you all, as we blow out our 20 candles, to take a bow, raise a glass and share your #Joomla20 story. The next commit, the next idea, the next decade of open-source magnificence starts with you.

Happy Birthday, Joomla, and thank you for proving to the world that when we build the web together, everyone wins.