Joomla's CMS Surges in Popularity

Published: April 17, 2012

by Alex Woodie

The organization behind the Joomla open source content management system (CMS) says downloads of its product increased by almost 40 percent over the past year, and now rests at 30 million total downloads since it started tracking the statistic in 2007.

Things seem to be going well for the Joomla CMS, which the organization says is used to power about 2.7 percent of the world's websites, or about 1.6 million websites by one count.

And there's a lot more in the pipeline. The organization says that at the end of March 2011, the CMS had been downloaded 22 million times. Since then, the organization has served more than 8 million additional copies of the free product. What's more, the company says that Joomla is currently being downloaded at the rate of more than a million per month, which translates to about 23 per second.

At least some of these downloads are destined for IBM i servers, which can run the PHP-based application and the MySQL database that it requires. IBM i shops just need a PHP environment on their server, such as a target="new" href="http://www.zend.com">Zend Technology's Zend Server for IBM i, to get started with a product like Joomla, or other open source PHP products like SugarCRM, Drupal, and Wordpress.

As for the MySQL database that so many PHP-based products like Joomla used … IBM i shops may be better off using DBi, the new drop-in replacement for MySQL on the IBM i OS. The availability of DBi from Zend does much to alleviate the uncertainty of PHP apps like Joomla on the IBM i platform created following Oracle's decision to kill IBM i support for MySQL.

While MySQL is the favored database for Joomla, customers can now run Microsoft SQL Server following the January release of Joomla 2.5. The next major release, Joomla 3.0, is due in September.

The market for third-party Joomla extensions is also growing rapidly. Over the past year, about 2,000 Joomla extensions have been introduced, the organization says. These extensions, which can be found at the Joomla extensions directory, provide a range of features not found in the core Joomla CMS, such as credit card processing, events, calendars, and forums.

"It is an exciting time for Joomla given its strong position powering 2.7 percent of the Web, combined with its unique opportunity to influence the next wave of mobile and cloud Web development," stated Paul Orwig, the new president of Open Source Matters , a non-profit organization created to help the Joomla project. "The platform split that enables Joomla to be used for developing mobile and cloud computing apps is a welcomed new wave of innovation for the Joomla community."

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