Today Joomla! turns five years old. Congratulations to all!

On September 1st, 2005 the joomla.org websites were launched, at which point Joomla was was an unknown name to the world.

Right now, Joomla has been downloaded 18,317,160 times (at a current speed of about 190,000 downloads per week), an estimate of 1.75 million websites use Joomla and exactly  5519 extensions have been submitted to the Joomla Extensions Directory. Furthermore, the search term 'Joomla' is typed in to Google approximately 6.4 times per second (yes, that means that if you finish reading this blog, over 300 people have searched for 'Joomla' on Google!).

There are lots of people congratulating Joomla in their own special way today.

Steve Burge from Open Source Matters has written a post at joomla.org about what made Joomla the success it now is. From humble beginnings, to tens of millions of downloads and a huge community.

Joomla is now one of the most popular software projects in the world.

Approximately 2.5% of the web runs on Joomla.

It is used by organizations as large as Apple, McDonald’s and the United Nations and by millions of people for their companies, hobbies and charities.

How did we get here from such humble beginnings? You.

Joomla is 100% community-owned and operated.

Joomla has no Venture Capital firms behind it. Joomla has no parent company, no shareholders and no investors behind it. Joomla has no C.E.O., no dictator and no owner. It has you.

• You means the 19 members of the original development team that founded Joomla.
• You means the 10s of millions of people who have downloaded or installed Joomla.
• You means the 2334 developers who have written over 5500 extensions for Joomla.
• You means the site builders who use Joomla to create wonderful websites.
• You means the designers who create spectacular, cutting-edge templates.
• You means the coders who write and maintain Joomla's core.
• You means the 2348 people who have reported issues, submitted patches, and committed fixes to the core.
• You means the dedicated volunteers that keep the joomla.org family of sites running.
• You means the volunteers who contribute by answering questions in the Joomla! and regional groups and forums.
• You means the contributors to the Joomla! Community Magazine.
• You means the people who have served in the Joomla Working Groups and Teams, and on the Open Source Matters board.
• You means the Development & Community Sponsors, and those who contribute financially to the project.
• You means the Translation Teams who translate Joomla into 64+ languages.
• You means the hundreds of 1000s of companies that build successful businesses with the help of Joomla.
• You means thousands of people meeting at the 277 Registered Joomla! User Groups and Joomla! Day events around the world.

Thank you for 5 wonderful years!

Together we can keep building great software and a great community for many years to come.

Brian Teeman, one of the original founders of Joomla, has written a post on the first five years of Joomla.

Brian writes:

I thought long and hard about what to write for this Birthday blog post.

I started to look back at the early days, back in September and October 2005, to see if the aims and ideas of the co-founders have come to fruition.

Then I realised that we had no grand aims of world domination just a desire to work together with a wider community to build something special.

Some great people in the Joomla Community have put together a birthday movie for Joomla. In the movie, people from all over the globe congratulates Joomla on the 5 year anniversary.