The Open Learning Centre

Product Name: Joomla!^®

Type: Content Management System

License: GPL

Joomla! is the engine behind many hundreds of thousands of web sites. A content management system provides a framework which allows for the separation of the content, the user's interaction and the look and feel, so designers can design and the owner of the site can concentrate on the content itself. The menus and positioning of various components on the viewers screen are also controlled by the backend management interface.

The Joomla! application itself is written in a very widely used programming language called PHP (an open source language itself) and makes use of the world's most popular open source database MySQL to store and manage the content. The website you are reading this page on now, is using Joomla! 1.5, PHP, MySQL, Apache (the web server) and is running on a Linux operating system. All of the software is Open Source and is also free.

The phenomenon that is Joomla! began only relatively recently. Joomla! was born in 2005 following a split by the original developers of Mambo due to the direction the commercial entity behind Mambo wanted to go. The rest, as they say, is history:

This screenshot from Google trends shows the volume of global search traffic for the two CMS from January 2004 until today (29/07/08).

Here is a 2008 report from water & stone which investigates the relative market shares of the main Open Source CMS available today: {docs}oss-cms-surveypdf{/docs}.

The Joomla!® name is used under a limited license from Open Source Matters in the United States and other countries. The Open Learning Centre is not affiliated with or endorsed by Open Source Matters or the Joomla! Project.