Joomla! and the latest trends in the open source revolution

Australia's Andrew Eddie and Brad Baker, two of the core team members of Joomla!, the free open-source Internet content management system (CMS) that in three years has grown into a global development community with more than three million downloads in a year, will be guest speakers at a special event in Sydney on May 19, 2008

Australia's Andrew Eddie and Brad Baker, two of the core team members of Joomla!, the free open-source Internet content management system (CMS) that in three years has grown into a global development community with more than three million downloads in a year, will be guest speakers at a special event in Sydney on May 19, 2008.

The content management system has grown into a global development community with more than three million downloads a year.

Eddie and Baker will talk about the latest trends in the open source revolution.

In a statement they said:"We will talk about the latest trends in the open-source revolution that has liberated online software from the proprietorial designs of companies like Microsoft and made feature-rich Web sites affordable for all businesses, not-for-profit groups and individuals."

Eddie and Baker are keynote speakers at the annual JoomlaDay Conference being held at the Sydney Conference and Exhbition Centre in Darling Harbour.

The Joomla! project has deep Australian roots.

It began in 2005 as an offshoot of the Sydney-based Mambo content management system, after members of the Mambo development team became concerned about protecting key open source principles they believed were being violated.

Andrew Eddy (aka "MasterChief") wrote an open letter that within a day had garnered the support of a thousand developers in the global free software community.

The name later chosen for the new open source project is derived from the Swahili "jumla," meaning "all together" or "as a whole."

Since then the community has grown exponentially.

As of February 2008, the official Joomla support forum, moderated by Brad Baker, has more than 260,000 threads and 1.2 million posts from more than 170,000 registered members in 40 languages.

Joomla! leverages much open source and Web 2.0 technology, and now offers more than 3,000 add-on features, from podcasts to calendars, wikis to social networking tools.

A live demonstration of the power of Joomla! will be held on May 20, 2008, with a team of developers building a fully functional Web site for a nominated charity in less than seven hours.