Beginner's Guide

Chapter 1
Introduction
Welcome to Joomla. It is a free system for creating websites. It is an open source project, which, like
most open source projects, is constantly in motion. It is unpredictable, sometimes indescribable, partially
controversial, quite often very sexy and, at times, a little sleepy and provincial. Nevertheless, or perhaps
because of these reasons, it has been extremely successful for six years now7and is popular with millions
of users worldwide.
Concerning the question whether to write Joomla (with a !) or Joomla (without a !) after years of
finding out people reached a consensus:
Use it once in the first instance of Joomla and then forget it!
The word Joomla is a derivative of the word Jumla7from the African language of Swahili and means
"all together".
The Project Joomla is the result of a heated discussion between the Mambo Foundation, which was
founded in August 2005, and its7 then-development team. Joomla is a development of the7 successful
system Mambo. Joomla is used all over the world for simple homepages and for complex corporate
websites as well. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable.
The Joomla team has organised and reorganised itselfthroughout the last six years
•
From 20057to 2009, Joomla 1.0 was7further developed up to version 1.0.15 and that development
was officially laid off7in September 2009.
•
From 2005 until now, Joomla 1.5 is still being7 developed, was7 introduced as a stable version in
January 2008, and will officially 'end of life' (EOL) in April 2012.
•
From 2008 until 2011, Joomla 1.6 was developed. A stable version7has been7available since January
2011.
•
In July 2011 Joomla 1.7 was released
•
Joomla 2.5 is the first long term release (LTS) since Joomla 1.5 was released in January 2012
(coming soon :) )
The users of7the Joomla system remained faithful. Many7transferred their websites from Mambo to
Joomla and they7have learned a lot over the years.
Many users have climbed aboard in the last few years7 but there are still people in the world who do not
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 16