Joomla Version History

The Project Joomla is the result of a heated discussion between the Mambo Foundation, which was founded in August 2005, and its then-development team.

Joomla is a development of the successful system Mambo. Mambo CMS was developed by an Australian company in 2001.

Joomla is used all over the world for creating simple web pages and for complex websites as well. It is easy to install, easy to manage, secure and very reliable.

Background

Joomla was the result of a fork of Mambo that name was trademarked by Miro International Pvt. Ltd., who formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose of funding the project and protecting it from lawsuits.

However, the Joomla development team claimed that many of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the elected Mambo Steering Committee, lacked the necessary consultation with key stakeholders and included provisions that violated core open source values.

Version Naming & Release System

The strategies have been modified to not lock in a specific release as the LTS release of a series. Under the revised strategy, unless superseded with a newer minor release, there will be at least two years of support for the last minor release of a series. The concept of an LTS release has being eliminated. For example, if 3.4 were to be the final minor release of the 3.x series, it would be supported for at least two years after its release.

The version identifiers for Joomla follow a three level numerical convention where the levels are defined by change significance - 

Joomla 1.x Series

Joomla 1.0 was released on 22nd September, 2005. It was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3.

Joomla 1.5 was released on 22nd January, 2008. The last release of this version (on 27th March, 2012) was 1.5.26. This version was the first to attain long term support (LTS). 

April 2012 marked the official end-of-life of Joomla 1.5; with Joomla 3.0 released, support for Joomla 1.5 faded away in April 2013.

Joomla 1.6.0 was released on 10th January, 2011. This version added a full access control list functionality plus, user-defined category hierarchy, and admin interface improvements.

Joomla 1.7.0 was released on 19th July, 2011; six months after 1.6.0. This version added enhanced security and improved migration tools.

Joomla 2.x Series

Joomla 2.5.0 was released on 24th January, 2012 (six months after 1.7.0). This version is a long term support (LTS) release. Joomla! 2.5 support is planned to cease in December of 2014.

Joomla 3.x Series

Joomla 3.0 stable version was released in September 2012.

After six months, Joomla 3.1 was released in April 2013. This version included new tagging feature.

Joomla 3.2 was released in November 2013 and Joomla 3.3 was released in April, 2014.

Joomla 3.7 was released on 25 April, 2017.

Joomla 4.x Series

Joomla 4.0 will be for early adopters. Joomla 4.1 will be stable release.

Joomla Version Release Table

Version  Release Year, Month 
1.0  2005, September 
1.5  2008, January 
1.6  2011, January 
1.7 2011, July 
2.5 2012, January 
3.0 2012, September 
3.1 2013, April 
3.2 2013, November 
3.3 2014, April 
3.4 2015, February
3.5 2015
3.6  
3.7 2017, April