History
Quick Timeline of Joomla Events.
Before there was Joomla there was Mambo
- Miro released mambo in 2001
- Miro wanted to a commercial product, many of the contributors wanted a free open source project
- Miro wanted to take more control of the project so many of the of the team left to start Joomla
- Mambo was forked to create Joomla on August 17, 2005
- Andrew Eddie and the others were able to take 100% of the Mambo code since it was GPL
Then Came Joomla 1.0
- Released September 22, 2005
- Joomla 1.0 was basically Mambo 4.5.2 with a few extras
- It took less than 1 year for Joomla to eclipse the size of Mambo
Then Joomla 1.5
- Released January 22, 2008
- Joomla 1.5 was the first big rewrite to the software
Then Joomla 1.6
- Released January 10, 2011
- Next Major Release
- Added Access Control Lists
- Got rid of Sections / Categories / Articles and went to only Categories / Arcticles
- Big improvements in the Admin Interface
Then Joomla 2.5
- Released January 24, 2012
- Next Major Release
- Ofter referred to as the Joomla 2 branch
- Automatic Extension update notification
- Improved core search functionality
- Added database support for databases other than MySQL
Then Joomla 3.0
- Released September 27, 2012
- Next Major Release
- Responsive by Default (First Major CMS to acheive this)
- Twitter Bootstrap integration
- Big overhaul of admin interface to improve usability
- PostgreSQL support
Anyone think this numbering system is sort of crazy? Well lets talk about it.
Joomla Versions
Easy Explanation
Steve Burge at OS Training created a great post about understanding the Joomla versions.
http://www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/joomla-1-2-3/
I figure it is easier and better to link to his post thant recreate an already great post.
Interesting Note Drupal is going to a short term and long term release system
https://drupal.org/node/2135189
Long Explanation
You may notice the versions of Joomla start out ast Joomla 1.0, that makes sense. Then it jumps to Joomla 1.5, okay I can go with that.
Next comes Joomla 1.6 which sounds like a small increase in fucntionality, when in reality Joomla 1.6 has quite a bit of more functionality than 1.5.
Then next big release is Joomla 2.5, whoah what happened to Joomla 2.0, 2.1, 2.2. well between 1.6, 1,7, 1.8 and 2.5. The core team adopted a different release strategy.
This release strategy is to create serveral short term releases then create a long term release.
The short term releases introduce new functionality bug fixes and changes. They also are only supported for six months from release date.
The long term releases will end in .5.x and should only have bug fixes. these releases will be supported for 2 years from release date.
Other Joomla Resources
Joomla at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla
