Joomla content management system was the result of a fork of Mambo by the Joomla CMS development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pty Ltd, who established a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to create funding for the project and protect it from lawsuits. The Joomla! development team claimed that quite a lot of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the Mambo Steering Committee, key stake-holders opinion was neglected and, which is even more important, new foundation added to provisions that violated main open source values.
The Joomla CMS development team created a site called OpenSourceMatters to distribute information to users, web developers, internet designers and the online community in general. The project leader Andrew Eddie, also known as "MasterChief" wrote an open letter to the public which got shown up on the announcements section of the public community forum at mamboserver.com.
A little more than one thousand people registered as members of the opensourcematters.org web site within a day, almost all encouraged and supported the idea, and the internet site received the slashdot effect subsequently. Miro Boss Peter Lamont gave a public response to the development team in an document referred to as "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro". This event resulted in debate within the open source software community about the meaning of "open source". Forums at many other open source projects had been active with postings for and against both sides.
In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement, teams had been re-organized, and the community grew even larger. Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) assisted the Joomla core team beginning in August 2005, as indicated by Moglen's blog entry from that date and a related OSM announcement. The SFLC continue to supply legal guidance to the Joomla! project.
On August 18, 2005, Andrew Eddie called for community input on suggested names for the project. The core team pointed out that it would make the final decision for the project name based on community input. The core team at some point picked a name that was not on the list of suggested names provided by the community. On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla!", was introduced. The name is the English transliteration of the Arabic word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole", as well as "sentence" (as in, phrase).
On September 6, 2005, the development team called for logo submissions from the community, invited the community to vote on the logo preferred, and announced the community's decision on September 22, 2005. Following the logo selection, brand guidelines, a brand manual, and a set of logo resources had been then published on October 2, 2005 for the community's use.
Joomla! (Joomla 1..) was released on September 16, 2005. It was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 which, itself, was combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes.
Joomla! won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007.
On October 27, 2008, PACKT Publishing announced Johan Janssens the "Most Valued Person" (MVP) for his work as one of the lead developers of the 1.5 Joomla Framework and Architecture. In 2009 Louis Landry received the "Most Valued Person" award for his role as Joomla architect and progress coordinator.
Joomla! version 1.5 was released on January 22, 2008.
At the end of October 2009 a second alpha version of 1.6 was presented for testing .
By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report published the conclusion that Joomla! is the web's most popular open source content management system. That conclusion was based on an extensive analysis of rate of adoption patterns and brand strength and was backed by a survey of end users.
