Using Joomla!, 2nd Edition

Foreword

Ryan Ozimek

Board Member, Open Source Matters (OSM)

In 1999, I found myself in the middle of a war zone, embedded with a humanitarian relief organization in Eastern Europe. I was just another recent college graduate looking for ways to serve a higher purpose. During college, I’d paid my way through school by doing database consulting gigs since I had a knack for technology. In the golden era of the dot-com boom, I thought it would be great if there were a way to find affordable, effective, and open source technology that could be used to help those in need. Flash forward a few years to 2003. As I’m preparing to present a website solution to a nongovernmental organization in New York, an engineer on my company’s team showed me a content management system (CMS) called Mambo. At the time, trying to manage content on your website either required an engineering degree or was woefully underpowered to run even a simple blog. Mambo was different. It provided just the right balance of ease-of-use and robustness. “Power in simplicity” was the tagline. I was hooked.

Little did I know that 11 years later, more than 3% of the Web would be powered by Mambo’s successor, Joomla. Joomla brought a new way of thinking about website management when it evolved from Mambo in 2005. Website creation and management was no longer the domain of software developers, and instead “accidental techies” within organizations could now create content on the Web to share with the world. It also brought with ...