A month ago, the developers of Mambo, an open-source content management system, split with the new foundation created to oversee its development and promotion. The coders promised to continue developing their own version of the software.

That’s known in the business as a “fork”. Until last month, everyone involved was working on one piece of software: Mambo. (And a mighty fine piece of software it is, too.) But if you see Mambo’s history as a road, then as of last August it split into two new roads.

One road is being paved by the Mambo Foundation, and leads to future versions of Mambo. The other, the road taken by Mambo’s former developers, leads to a new piece of software — one that uses Mambo as a starting point but that will have its own features, strengths and, presumably, weaknesses.

This blog suggested the new software be named ChaCha. Inexplicably, the developers aren’t heeding that advice and have instead dubbed it Joomla! — an adaptation of the Swahili word for “all together”. The first version was released for download today.

As far as I can tell from the smallish screenshot on Joomla!’s home page, the back end looks a lot like Mambo, and that’s no surprise; this early in a fork, the roads still run pretty close to each other. The developers even describe this as little more than a “spring clean” of the latest stable build of Mambo.

The good news for Mambo users looking to jump on board the Joomla! bandwagon is that the similarity will make migrating from one platform to the other a lot easier than to, say, Drupal. (The bad news is Joomla!’s team still hasn’t quite fixed on how to deal with that exclamation mark; I recommend deletion.)

Happy birthday, Joomla! — and here’s to many more.