Is Joomla! dead? The rise and fall of Joomla!

Why it actually declined

Everything above is measurement. This part is not. It is what we watched from inside the ecosystem — fourteen years building and selling Joomla! products, two decades in this market — and where we could put a document or a number behind the claim, we have.

None of it is about the code. Joomla!’s code has usually been good. It is about how the project treated the people who bet businesses on it.

And none of it is hindsight. Joomla!’s own magazine published a piece called The Fall of Joomla! in June 2016 — a decade ago — naming several of these out loud. Nothing on that list got fixed.

1. Two major versions, twice the bill

   Until Joomla! 3, the project ran short-term and long-term releases in parallel and expected the ecosystem to carry both. From 2008 to 2014 an extension vendor was shipping for 1.5 and 2.5, or 2.5 and 3.x, at the same time: two codebases, two test matrices, two support queues, one revenue stream. Nobody at the top ever priced that for us.

   STS releases were supported seven months, LTS twenty-seven — and the project’s own policy said the first STS after an LTS “introduces fundamentally new features and changes that break compatibility with the previous LTS.” The model was abandoned in April 2014, after the shops that could not afford it had already left.

2. Shiny object syndrome

   MooTools while the rest of the web standardised on jQuery. Then jQuery and Bootstrap 2 baked into 3.0. Then Bootstrap 5 swapped into Joomla! 4 while Joomla! 4 was already in beta, after years of betas built on Bootstrap 4. Every switch had a defensible engineering argument and not one of them had a migration budget for the people downstream.

   The official 3.0 FAQ conceded “components and templates will need the most work.” A conflict report over MooTools and jQuery colliding was filed on release day itself. Akeeba, one of the largest vendors, described tracking Joomla! 4 through twelve alphas, seven betas and five release candidates as “obscene amounts of work due to the constant changes.”

3. Developers were always second-class citizens

   The Joomla! Extensions Directory was the distribution channel — the one place a small shop could be found. It has been purged, replatformed onto new URLs, and rebuilt again, and each time the vendors who had spent years earning rankings and reviews restarted from zero. It used to send real traffic. Now it collects dust.

   4,425 listings were purged in March 2013. The whole directory was replatformed in December 2014 onto a new URL scheme. Listings went from 9,559 in mid-2012 to 4,855 today. In 2024 reviews disappeared from listings for more than six months with the bug report sitting open. A fourth rebuild has been in progress since 2022.

4. It never decided who it was for

   WordPress went after marketers. Drupal went after enterprise developers. Joomla! sat between them and called it balance. For twenty years the pitch has been “more powerful than WordPress, easier than Drupal,” which tells a buyer you are the best at nothing. And the people who actually choose the CMS were never developers — they are the marketers who have to live in the admin every day. Joomla! never courted them, so they never came, and they were the ones doing the recommending.

   John Hooley made this argument in Joomla!’s own magazine in June 2016: positioning as a “middle” solution “communicates nothing to your audience except that you are not the best at anything,” and “unlike developers, marketers loved Wordpress and loathed Joomla!” Ten years on, the positioning has not changed.

5. No one was ever actually in charge

   WordPress has had Matt Mullenweg since 2003. Drupal has Dries Buytaert. Laravel has Taylor Otwell. Joomla! has had more than ten presidents since 2005, most of whom used the platform to build a personal profile and moved on. You cannot run a twenty-year platform on two-year terms and call the result a strategy.

   As of March 2026 the presidency of Open Source Matters is vacant, and a Joomla! co-founder published a piece in the project’s own magazine titled “Who Will Stand Up? The Next President of Open Source Matters.” The mechanism was named in that same magazine back in 2016: “some contributors have treated the project as their personal Game of Thrones and through Machiavellian tactics have driven out other contributors who disagreed with their vision for Joomla!”

6. The money went to travel, not to the product

   This one is not our opinion — it is in the foundation’s own published accounts. For years the majority of every dollar raised in Joomla!’s name went on flights, hotels and conferences, and not one of those years carries a line item for building the software. And if you ran a profitable business on Joomla!, partnering with the foundation was a wall rather than a door.

   Travel plus conferences and meetings were 70.4% of all expenses in 2016 and 76.3% across the eighteen months to June 2018. Neither period lists a development expense at all. In 2021 the board disclosed $37,149 spent outside its own financial policy — $23,497 of it by the sitting president, whose conduct the board recorded as “unacceptable behaviour from an officer.” Income fell from $436,543 in 2016 to $66,182 in 2023–24. Meanwhile the 2008 trademark rules refused any extension name beginning with “Joomla!” and licensed the name only to GPL extensions.

7. They never built the local scene

   WordPress built an institution to carry local events — money, contracts and legal liability held centrally so an organiser in Dhaka or Bologna only has to organise. Joomla! wrote a charter that pushed all of it back onto volunteers, then cut the little it did fund. Communities do not appear because a project recognises them. They appear because someone underwrites the room.

   Joomla!’s events charter makes local organisers “solely responsible for all actions and liabilities,” caps event funding at $500 and requires seed money to be repaid. JoomlaDays peaked at 36 events in 2014; WordCamps ran 115 in 2016 and 142 in 2019. In 2018 Joomla! cancelled its own World Conference and the programme that helped volunteers travel to events.

8. And the roadmap was always a rumour

   This is the one you can see in every chart on this page. Agencies do not need a platform to be fast. They need it to be predictable, because they sign contracts against it. For a decade Joomla! could not tell anyone what was shipping or when — and a vendor who cannot answer that question loses the deal to one who can.

   Joomla! 4 was promised “before the end of 2018” and arrived in August 2021. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace all passed Joomla! inside that window.