20 years of helping out on the Joomla forum

In October 2006, I was asked to join the team of the official international Joomla forum.

It is now September 2026. Almost exactly 20 years later, I am still there, helping out as a Global Moderator. I certainly did not expect that when I started.

Mambo CMS

It all started with Mambo. Before Joomla, I was using Mambo CMS to build websites. Like many people working with an open source CMS, I regularly ran into problems. When that happened, I went to the Mambo forum. At the time, I mostly used the forum to find solutions. I searched for people who had encountered the same problem, tried their suggestions, fixed my website and moved on. So I was a forum user, not really a forum contributor.

Then, in August 2005, the entire Mambo core team, all volunteers, disagreed with the direction the company behind Mambo wanted to take. They decided to leave and start a new CMS: Joomla. On 18 August 2005, I joined the new Joomla forum. I wanted to help make the new project a success and give something back to the CMS I was using, so I started reading other people's questions. When I knew the answer, I replied. When I didn't, I often followed the discussion anyway. That turned out to be an excellent way to learn a lot about Joomla.

Learning by answering questions

One of the things I have always liked about technical forums is that helping someone else forces you to think about a problem differently. You might know how something works on your own website, but explaining it clearly to somebody else is another matter. And when you don't know the answer, somebody else often does. By reading questions and answers on the Joomla forum, I learned a huge amount about Joomla, PHP, web servers, extensions, configuration problems and all the strange things that can happen when people build and maintain websites. And at the same time, I was able to give something back.

That combination is one of the strengths of an open source community. You arrive because you need help. You learn. Eventually, you discover that you can help the next person.

Joining the Joomla forum team

In October 2006, after being active on the forum for about a year, I was asked to join the forum team. My question was: "How much time would that take?". The answer was reassuring: "Not much more than the time you're already spending on the forum". So I said yes.

Little did I know that this simple "yes" would lead to two decades of involvement in the Joomla project.

Over the years, my Joomla activities expanded far beyond the forum. I have served in various roles, including the Community Leadership Team, Operations Department Coordinator and the Joomla Board of Directors. I have been a Google Summer of Code mentor, contributed code to Joomla's core, and was one of the Release Managers for Joomla 5.2. Those roles have all been different. Some were highly technical, others were more about organisation, communication or helping people work together. But throughout all those changes, the forum remained a constant.

Twenty years later

And that brings me back to September 2026. I joined the Joomla forum on 18 August 2005. I joined the forum team in October 2006. Twenty years later, I am still volunteering there as a Global Moderator.

The forum itself has changed. Its software changed from Simple Machines Forum to phpBB3. Joomla has changed enormously. The web has changed. And the way people look for technical help has changed too, from forums and search engines to Stack Overflow, social media, chat platforms and, more recently, AI assistants. I moved along with some of those changes as well. Since May 2021, I have also been one of the moderators of Joomla Stack Exchange, which means I have been helping out there for almost five and a half years too.

But the basic idea behind a community support forum is still very valuable:

• Someone has a problem.
• Someone else has seen it before.
• And someone takes the time to help.
• Sometimes the person asking the question today becomes the person answering questions tomorrow.
• And because the answers are public, they can help many more people who run into the same problem later.

That is exactly how it happened for me.

P.S. Don't tell anyone, but a couple of times I have run into a problem, Googled for a solution, and stumbled upon an old Joomla forum post where I had solved exactly the same problem for someone else years earlier. Then again, with more than 25,000 forum posts, you can't be expected to remember every one of them.

Why am I still doing it?

After 20 years, you might reasonably ask why I am still spending time moderating a forum for an open source CMS. There isn't one big reason. I like solving problems. I like sharing knowledge. I like the international nature of the Joomla community. And I still enjoy seeing somebody arrive with a problem and leave with a working solution. But perhaps most importantly, the forum represents something that attracted me to open source in the first place: people voluntarily sharing their knowledge so that everybody benefits.

My own Joomla journey started by looking for answers to my problems. Then I started answering other people's questions. That led to an invitation to join the forum team, and from there to contributing code, mentoring developers, organising teams, serving in various roles in the Joomla project and helping manage a Joomla release.

Quite a lot came from simply deciding to answer a few questions on a forum. And after 20 years? I'm still answering them.