Joomla is developed by a community of volunteers supported with the legal, organisational and financial resources of Open Source Matters, Inc. Joomla is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming techniques, simple software design patterns, and stores data in a Structured Query Language (MySQL/MariaDB) database.

[3] Joomla includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, blogs, search, and support for language internationalisation.

[9] Joomla's original co-founders, Andrew Eddie, Brian Teeman, Johan Janssens, Jean-Marie Simonet, et al.,[10] established Open Source Matters, Inc. (OSM) to distribute information to the software community.

[17] Independently of the project, Andrew Eddie and Louis Landry created a company called JXtended[18] to continue the development of Control—an ACL component—that could integrate with Joomla 1.5.

This redefined the role of the team leading the project and structured it more around community involvement in events, the Google Summer of Code projects, and other activities; the intention of the new approach to team-building was also an effort to increase community participation in the development process instead of relying upon a small group of coders to do most of the work.

[23] Following Eddie's departure in September 2011, OSM sought feedback from the community, including the possibility of constituting the governing body under a new name, to restructure the board's membership and project leadership.

[27] Lacking support from OSM, an enthusiastic following from the Joomla community, and unable to progress beyond pre-Alpha status, Molajo collapsed around the middle of 2015.

[28] In January 2012, another major revision was announced: Joomla 2.5 (essentially bringing together the two previous minor releases from the preceding year).

[29] In March 2014, after seeking community feedback and a submission from the Production Leadership Team, a newly constituted OSM board approved changing the licensing for the framework from GPLv2 to LGPL.

[34] Towards the end of 2014—three years after calling for feedback about ways to reorganise the project[24] and with Joomla 3.x into its fourth minor revision—the community discussed the leadership structure changes.

An opinion written in May 2015 by Nicholas Dionysopoulos (founder of Akeeba Ltd.) shared some of Eddie's earlier observations about OSM's lack of vision, entrepreneurship, and ability to manage the project.

[42] In an effort to improve the relationship with the community, the development team revised the 2014 plan and, in June 2018, produced a new roadmap with the expectation that Joomla 4.0 would be released in a stable form before the end of 2018.

A lengthy debate that started in March 2019 and initially focused on the aesthetics and usability of the Joomla 4 backend interface highlighted an overall sense of disappointment with management and progress of the project.

[48] Although the debate was weighted heavily on criticising the backend aesthetics, people on all sides of the discussion aired their dissenting opinions about why the Joomla 4 project had become distracted by feature creep, software bloat, eventual cost overrun and lack of trust.

Against a background of unrelenting criticism from within the community and declining popular interest in Joomla at the time[20] a conference was held in January 2020 to develop a strategy for the future.

[49] The conference identified several key areas for further work but basically accepted the premise that faults related mainly to the project's organisational framework rather than the quality of the product.

[50] On May 28, 2020, the Joomla team disclosed that a data breach had occurred that potentially affected 2,700 users by exposing their personal details.

[51] The incident was discovered by an internal audit of the website that also highlighted the presence of superuser accounts owned by individuals outside OSM.

Although no evidence was found of any unauthorised access to personal information, action was immediately taken to mitigate the risk, including a requirement for all users to change their passwords.

The Joomla project also lost a significant part of its volunteer base as a result of an ageing population, continuing disillusionment about the future direction and a perceived absence of transparency about the board's activities.

In April 2022 Abrahall commenced defamation action against OSM; the case ended in March 2023 with the plaintiff voluntarily withdrawing her lawsuit.

[59][60][61] Joomla remained popular with its adherents but, as the continuing downward trend[20] showed, confined to small niche market amongst hobbyists and SMBs, unsuited to large corporate use.

[85] On 24 December 2012 it was decided to include an unforeseen addition to the 3.x series to improve the development life cycle and extend the support of LTS versions.

Notes: Imposes additional minimum technical requirements for PHP 8.2 and MySQL 8.0 or equivalent The Joomla project manages its activities (e.g. trademarking, licensing, marketing, software development, documentation, media releases, etc.)

In a broad sense, the Joomla project is aligned with WordPress, Drupal and Typo3 to address their concerns with the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

[127] The project receives the rest of its revenue from website advertising, commissions, examination fees, and Google Summer of Code.

The Joomla project does not endorse or recommend extensions created independently of the CMS development team nor does it offer any support for problems that may arise through the use of these products.

Local communities of Joomla users and developers exist around the world to share news, assist people with problems and organise events.