38 Percent Year-Over-Year Download Increase Driven by Large Developer Community Support.

Joomla, one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced that downloads have risen 38 percent from December 2010 to December 2011. To date, Joomla has been downloaded more than 27 million times*, making it one of the most downloaded content management systems in the world.

In addition to download growth, Joomla also experienced double-digit growth in many other areas, including:

• Joomla extensions developed by outside vendors increased by 41 percent annually to 8,475 as of October 31, 201.
• The number of forum users jumped 23 percent annually as of October 31, 2011, meaning more and more people are interacting to help shape Joomla.

"We've seen double and in some cases triple digit growth in Joomla's adoption since 2007," said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the not-for-profit created to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "Part of what's driven this massive number of downloads is an explosion of community involvement in the project."

More than 225,000 registered developers participate in the joomlacode.org site where open source developers work together to build extensions and the core codebase. More than 852 commercial development firms and individual developers support the more than 8,000 extensions available for Joomla. About 3,000 individuals have directly contributed to the development of the core codebase via project tools at joomlacode.org.

Joomla recently received recognition for its continued growth when Packt Publishing honored Joomla with its "Top Open Source Content Management System" award. Joomla previously won the same award, the Packt Open Source CMS Award, in 2006 and also won the Packt Best PHP Open Source CMS Award 2007.

Info-Tech Research also recently praised Joomla in October 2011 calling it the "market pillar" of the Web content management market in a report. In the report, Info-Tech confirmed Joomla powers more than 1.5 million websites. These include Citibank, eBay, General Electric and many more.

*Joomla began tracking its CMS downloads in 2007, even though the system was launched in 2005. Furthermore, Joomla's open-source community only tracks English versions of downloads (Joomla is available in at least 64 languages). Considering these two factors alone, the real number of Joomla downloads is presumably much higher than 27 million.