_______ Joomla 1.5 _______

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Joomla 1.5, the first major release of the popular content management system.

In January 2008, the first stable release was downloaded almost 200,000 times. Since then, the total number has exploded to over 8 million downloads. Joomla is seeing the highest rate of adoption ever.

That same month, the Joomla Extensions Directory contained 2,600 extensions written for Joomla 1.0.x, a small percentage of which worked with Joomla 1.5. Today, that number is approaching 5,000 and most are Joomla 1.5 native. The JED is a a powerful barometer of the commitment of the community to the Joomla Project and platform.

And that community continues to grow exponentially. The Joomla Discussion Forums contain over 1.5 million posts from almost 250,000 users. The spirit of open source, collaboration, and users helping users has never been stronger.

The Joomla Web sites have undergone a dramatic facelift and restructuring to better serve our users of all levels and the positive feedback has been overwhelming. Last January, there were approximately 10 million unique visitors to the family of Joomla sites and that number has doubled to 20 million in the last year.

The Joomla Project teams have released nine versions of Joomla 1.5 in the last year, improving security, increasing usability, fixing bugs, and adding new features.

The Joomla Code forge provides a solid development resource for almost 1,500 open source projects and over 138,000 developers.

Around 20 Joomla Days (and countless other events and expos) took place in 2008, allowing people all over the world to not only learn more about Joomla, but to connect an untold number of developers, users, and designers in one of the most unique open source projects in the history of the Internet.

Clearly, the state of Joomla is strong and on the upswing.