Foreword to the First Edition

Joomla! is steeped in a rich and sometimes controversial history. During its tumultuous start in August of 2005, no one could have imagined how far this little project would stretch in terms of reach, nor could anyone have imagined how much it would grow in terms of depth of participation and resources available to the community. I still vividly remember the day I published the now-famous “Open Letter to the Community” that you find in Chapter 1 of this book. Those were uncertain times for the 19 founders and 100 or so members of the forum team to leave comfortable surroundings and start over with nothing but courage and raw determination.

Today, I am writing this foreword having just attended a 200-person-strong local conference in San Jose, California, and my compatriot across the table is off to Italy to address 700 at a similar event. These are but two of dozens of such events held all around the world each year, on every continent (except Antarctica, of course, but maybe one day), to celebrate as a community this amazing thing called Joomla! The right words are hard to find, but one is certainly appropriate: Wow!

Joomla!’s mission is “to provide a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration.” To that end, and at the time of this writing, we have 64 official languages; hundreds of professional service providers; over 6,000 (that we know about) Joomla! extensions; thousands of template designs to choose from; and tens of millions of Web sites deployed all around the world. Joomla! is arguably the easiest software program of its type—both to use and to master. It has been designed both for the most basic user and for the master artisan who wants to take a site beyond the normal limits of the core download. Joomla! carries a legacy of a user interface with pleasing eye candy and a wide choice of the most beautiful templates available for any site-building system in the world. Particularly close to my heart is our passion for continuing to improve the way in which we deliver Joomla! to more and more people in their own languages.

All together by name and all together by nature, Joomla! (meaning “all together” in Swahili) sought from the very beginning to ensure it would be free for the entire community at its founding and into the future. It was set up deliberately to ensure that no one person could ever “own” Joomla!, a detail that gives Open Source Matters—the Joomla! nonprofit—the freedom to provide stewardship in the best interests of the project rather than a parent company’s bottom line. Combined with the two main project leadership teams for software production and community management, Joomla! as a whole has one of the most progressive and mature leadership structures of any open source project.

Five years after its founding—and on the heels of both Microsoft and eBay becoming collaborators and contributors to the Joomla! core source code—we begin another phase in our life journey as a project: the inception of Joomla! Press and the first (with extreme emphasis on “first”) official Joomla! book. Joomla! is about allowing ordinary people to do extraordinary things, and that is exactly what the authors of this book do for its readers.

So, without further ado, I present this book for your pleasure. It begins with how we began and takes you on a journey through which you can be empowered to reach the world.

—Andrew Eddie
Member of the Joomla! Production Leadership Team
October 2010