Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Joomla 1.5, the first major release of the popular content management system.
In January 2008, the first stable release was downloaded almost 200,000 times. Since then, the total number has exploded to over 8 million downloads. Joomla is seeing the highest rate of adoption ever.
That same month, the Joomla Extensions Directory contained 2,600 extensions written for Joomla 1.0.x, a small percentage of which worked with Joomla 1.5. Today, that number is approaching 5,000 and most are Joomla 1.5 native. The JED is a a powerful barometer of the commitment of the community to the Joomla Project and platform.
And that community continues to grow exponentially. The Joomla Discussion Forums contain over 1.5 million posts from almost 250,000 users. The spirit of open source, collaboration, and users helping users has never been stronger.
The Joomla Web sites have undergone a dramatic facelift and restructuring to better serve our users of all levels and the positive feedback has been overwhelming. Last January, there were approximately 10 million unique visitors to the family of Joomla sites and that number has doubled to 20 million in the last year.
The Joomla Project teams have released nine versions of Joomla 1.5 in the last year, improving security, increasing usability, fixing bugs, and adding new features.
The Joomla Code forge provides a solid development resource for almost 1,500 open source projects and over 138,000 developers.
Around 20 Joomla Days (and countless other events and expos) took place in 2008, allowing people all over the world to not only learn more about Joomla, but to connect an untold number of developers, users, and designers in one of the most unique open source projects in the history of the Internet.
Clearly, the state of Joomla is strong and on the upswing.
Looking forward in 2009
The retirement of the Joomla 1.0.x series in 2009 reallocates resources to the future of Joomla and in 2008, the white paper process allowed the community to submit suggestions and prioritize focus on features for the next major version of Joomla. With that process complete and all the Joomla teams working tirelessly toward this goal, the delivery of Joomla 1.6 in 2009 promises to push the envelope even further.
The family of Joomla Web sites provide an energizing hub for users and developers worldwide and work to improve their effectiveness is an ongoing effort. New ways to excite users about the power of Joomla and new ways to engage developers with the sophistication of the Joomla framework are in progress.
Joomla events are wasting no time in amassing users in 2009. Already, there are many scheduled events. Of note are the Melbourne Joomla Day '09, Joomla Day UK, and Joomla Day Las Vegas, where members of the Joomla team will be on hand to give first-hand help and information.
The promise of Joomla's future is limitless. The foundations of freedom, innovation, and creativity help lead the charge in developing one of the most empowering publishing platforms available. The Joomla Project is grateful for the trust which users have placed in us and hopes to make 2009 as prosperous as 2008.