Today we celebrate the 8th anniversary of the 1st release of the Joomla! CMS

image by @Helvecio

In 2005, a community of software developers and users, from all over the world, decided to stand, together as a whole, and take control of their own destiny.

That resulted in the birth of a new software project, that announced its name on the 1st of September: Joomla!

Over the days of the 15th, 16, and 17th (depending on your timezone), Joomla! 1.0.0 was announced, tagged, and released.

---------------- 1.0.0 Released -- [17-Sep-2005 00:30 UTC] ------------------

Over the years the Joomla! community has grown and expanded to where we now have:

• 44,9 million downloads of all versions of the Joomla! CMS to date;
• 2,8 million posts in 675 thousand topics by 619,914 registered Forum members;
• two different versions (series) of the CMS available at any one time, as well as the Joomla! Framework;
• 67 accredited translations of the CMS;
• 6995 extensions for Joomla! 2.5 and 3.x on the Joomla! Extensions Directory;
• the 13th most forked PHP repo on GitHub, with 858 active forks;
• nearly 1000 bugs fixed in the last year;
• more than 160 registered Joomla! User Groups;
• 29 international, community-organized JoomlaDay events over the past 12 months;
• the 4th international Jandbeyond event, and our first Joomla! World Conference,
• and the Joomla! Community Magazine now in English as well as Spanish editions.

Thank you

Thank you to the hundreds of volunteers in various teams, from Forum Moderators, to Joomla! Bugsquad members, UX Team, Documentation, Marketing & PR, Social Media, Trademark, Events, and the thousands more that are involved in their local Joomla User Group (JUG), core and extension translations, forums and JoomlaDay events.

Joomla! would not be around today if it was not for the ongoing and enthusiastic support of our world-wide community, and for the free and open source code that the CMS and Framework is built on.

Celebrate

We invite you to celebrate the 8th anniversary of the first Joomla! CMS release, at your next JUG meetup, or by joining one of the Software Freedom Day events on Saturday, the 21st of September, where you can celebrate software freedom, with others in the free and open source software (FOSS) community.

Please discuss this blog here: https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=704&t=819756