What was born just before YouTube and Twitter, powers whole websites with open source code and has now been downloaded 25 million times? Joomla! The popular Content Management System with an exclamation point in its name passed a major milestone this month and now says its future will be based on helping developers build all kinds of other apps.
“We in the Joomla leadership are looking for ways to help developers grow and keep up with the next generation of community needs,” says Joomla’s Ryan Ozimek. “College kids these days aren’t interested in commenting systems, they want to use Joomla to build the next Twitter and Facebook in the cloud. The same way that things have been done in the last 10 years in CMS development, we’re going to expand Joomla [into a platform for building] mobile and web apps.”
The people behind Joomla have counted and believe that 2.7% of the pages on the Web are powered by their Content Management System. Born as a fork of the Mambo CMS, Joomla has now seen three times as many downloads as its parent software.
Ozimek says Joomla is well-suited to become the app development platform of choice for young and new developers in particular because of its simplicity. He believes that the developer community already amassed around the Content Management System will be a powerful asset in supporting app developers and will in return be strengthened by an infusion of new energy.
