An Australian company, Miro, developed a CMS named Mambo in the year 2001. It made this system available as open-source software to test it and to make sure of a wider distribution. In the year 2002, the company split its product Mambo into a commercial and an open-source version.

The commercial variant was called Mambo CMS, the open-source version Mambo Open Source (MOS). In the meantime, all parties involved agreed that MOS can officially be called Mambo and together a successful future for the fastest developing CMS of the moment was secured.

The advantages of the commercial version for companies are primarily in increased security and the fact that they have the company Miro, which also supports further development, as a partner.

The advantage the open-source version offers is that it is free and that an enormous community of users and developers alike provide continuous enhancements. In addition, it is possible for enterprises to take Mambo as a base and to build their own solutions on top of it.

In order to secure the existence and the continued development of Mambo, there were deliberations on all sides in the course of the year 2005 to establish a foundation for the open-source version of Mambo. On August 10, 2005 it finally happened: The Mambo Foundation was announced on the Mambo project page.

After the positive reactions in the first few hours, it quickly became obvious that Miro in Australia established the foundation and that the developer team had not been included into the incorporation modalities. Heated discussions erupted in the forums of the community and the developer team wrapped itself in silence for a few long days.

On the August 17, 2005 a statement was finally published by OpenSourceMatters, announcing that it would be advised by the neutral Software Freedom Law Center and was planning the continued development of Mambo.

Discord quickly developed between the Miro Mambo Foundation that was all of a sudden without a development team and an inflamed international community of hundreds of thousands of users. The parties sometimes called each other names in blogs, forums, and the respective project pages.

Meanwhile, development of both projects continued. The Mambo Foundation released a beta version of Mambo 4.5.3 on the August 26, 2005, which was not well received in the relevant forums. The development team itself, of course, needed a new name for the split entity.

On September 1, 2005, the name for the split entity was announced—Joomla!. This time the developer team secured itself the rights for the use of a name and also gave the community the option of changing their existing Mambo domains over to the new name before it was announced publicly.

In no time at all, 8,000 users registered with the new forum. The new project needed a logo and thus, on the September 7, 2005, a competition was announced to the community. A number of logo suggestions were published on September 14, 2005 and the new (old) community was asked to agree on the new Joomla! logo. The suggestions and results can, of course, be found online.

Gradually many of the third-party developers—developers who program their own extensions, for example, a forum or a picture gallery on a foundation of Joomla! or other systems—also switched from Mambo to Joomla!.

VA software, the company that, among other things, operates the SourceForge.net developer page, decided to sponsor the Joomla! project's server infrastructure. As interim high point Joomla! won two prizes at Linuxworld in London in October.

One was for the best Linux or Open Source project in the year 2005 and the other was the prize received by core member Brian Teeman for his support of Open Source projects (UK Individual Contribution to Open Source). You can find a detailed summary of the events in English on the Internet at www.devshed.com is the new Mambo.