Joomla is a free, open-source CMS that sits right between WordPress’s ease of use and Drupal’s developer muscle. It gives you a solid set of features right out of the box.
Background
Joomla launched in 2005 as a fork of the Mambo CMS, after a falling-out between Mambo’s developers and the company sponsoring it. It’s free and open source under the GPL, written in PHP, and it uses a MySQL database. Open Source Matters, Inc. and a worldwide community of volunteers maintain it.
Why People Choose Joomla
- Strong multilingual support built into the core — no extra extensions needed.
- Flexible content organization with nested categories and a built-in template override system.
- Advanced user management and Access Control Levels (ACL).
- A library of extensions and templates to add features and change the design.
- A good fit for social networking, membership, and community sites.
Joomla gives you more built-in capability than WordPress does out of the box, but it’s still more approachable than Drupal. That makes it a solid middle-ground pick for sites that need structured content and detailed user management.
Quick Facts
- Type: Open source (free, GPL license)
- First released: 2005 (forked from Mambo)
- Maintained by: Open Source Matters & community
- Built with: PHP and MySQL
- Best for: Structured content and community/membership sites
- Cost: Software is free; hosting costs extra