Joomla Is Older Than...

On 17 August, Joomla turns 21 years old.

Twenty-one years.

In human terms, that's old enough to buy a drink almost anywhere in the world.

In technology terms, it's practically prehistoric.

The tech industry loves shiny new things. Every year we're told that this framework, that JavaScript library or some AI tool is going to change everything forever.

Most of them don't.

Joomla just keeps turning up.

Twenty-one years is an eternity in technology. Entire industries have appeared, exploded in popularity and faded away during Joomla's lifetime.

To put its age into perspective...

Joomla is older than...

The gadgets we can't live without

• The iPhone
• Android
• The iPad
• The Apple Watch
• The Nintendo Switch
• The PlayStation 5
• Apple Vision Pro

When Joomla launched, BlackBerry was cool, Nokia ruled the world, and if you wanted directions you probably printed them before leaving home.

The modern web

Joomla predates...

• Google Chrome
• GitHub
• Node.js
• npm
• React
• Vue
• Svelte
• TypeScript
• CSS Grid
• Flexbox
• Tailwind CSS
• Vite

It's even older than the job title "Front-end Developer" becoming commonplace.

Back then you were just a web developer. You wrote the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, fixed the server, designed the logo and probably made the tea.

Social media

Joomla is older than...

• Twitter (now X)
• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Snapchat
• Discord
• TikTok
• Threads
• Bluesky

Facebook technically existed. If you happened to be a student at Harvard.

Entertainment

Joomla is older than...

• Netflix streaming
• Spotify
• Twitch
• Disney+
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Minecraft

When Joomla launched, Netflix still posted DVDs through the mail. Remember DVDs?

Companies that changed the world

Joomla is older than...

• Airbnb
• Uber
• Stripe
• Slack
• Zoom

Not bad for a free open source CMS.

Things we now take for granted

Joomla is older than...

• The word "selfie" becoming mainstream
• Contactless payments
• Streaming music
• Working from home becoming normal
• AI writing your code
• AI writing blog posts about Joomla turning 21…

I'll let you decide whether that's progress.

Joomla has survived...

During those twenty-one years we've seen...

• The global financial crisis
• Brexit
• The COVID pandemic
• Six FIFA World Cups
• Five Summer Olympic Games
• Seven UK Prime Ministers
• Four US Presidents
• The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope

It's been an eventful couple of decades.

The web has reinvented itself

When Joomla arrived...

• CSS layouts were only just replacing tables.
• Internet Explorer was the browser everyone loved to hate.
• Responsive web design didn't exist.
• Mobile-first wasn't a thing.
• Git hadn't been released.
• Composer didn't exist.
• AI was mostly science fiction.

Since then we've been told to embrace Web 2.0, Web 3.0, mobile-first, serverless, JAMstack, headless, low-code, no-code, blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse and now AI.

Some genuinely changed the industry.

Some... didn't.

Meanwhile Joomla quietly got on with improving itself.

• Namespaces
• Composer
• Web Services
• Accessibility improvements
• Modern PHP
• Modern JavaScript
• Better security
• Better performance
• A cleaner codebase

Not by chasing every trend, but by adopting the ones that actually mattered.

While countless "next big things" have come and gone, Joomla has quietly continued to evolve.

Twenty-one years later...

Very few open source projects make it this far.

Even fewer are still actively developed, releasing major versions, supported by a passionate community and powering hundreds of thousands of websites around the world.

Joomla has never been the loudest project. It has never had the biggest marketing budget. It has never chased headlines.

Instead, for twenty-one years, it has simply kept doing what open source does best.

Building.

Improving.

Adapting.

Surviving.

Joomla is older than your developer career...

• If you've only ever built React applications, Joomla is older than your entire career.
• If TypeScript feels like it's always existed, Joomla remembers when JavaScript didn't even have let.
• If your first deployment was through GitHub Actions, Joomla remembers when deployment meant dragging files into FileZilla and hoping for the best.
• If you've never uploaded a website using FTP, Joomla has.
• If you've never had to support Internet Explorer 6, count yourself lucky. Some of us still wake up in a cold sweat.
• If you've never sliced a Photoshop mock-up into HTML tables, you missed absolutely nothing.
• If you've never wondered whether your website looked right in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari, you've lived a privileged life.

And if you think AI has always been part of web development...

Well, Joomla remembers when autocomplete in your editor felt like magic.

That's the thing about twenty-one years. It's long enough to outlive countless trends, survive more than a few revolutions and still be standing while yesterday's "next big thing" has become tomorrow's forgotten GitHub repository.

Not bad for a project that started with a simple idea: build great software together.

Happy 21st Birthday, Joomla.

Here's to the next chapter.