Ah, Joomla. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about the early years of my career, you’ll know I didn’t exactly follow a carefully planned path into web development. I stumbled, experimented, broke things, fixed things, and somehow kept moving. And somewhere in the middle of all that, around 2011, I found myself hunting for a CMS that a new client could actually use without phoning me every ten minutes. Something flexible. Something friendly. Something that didn’t require a sacrificial goat and a full moon to publish a blog post.

That’s how I discovered Joomla.

Back then, Joomla was already a pretty serious machine. A proper CMS, built on PHP, running off MySQL, and structured around a surprisingly clean MVC architecture. It wasn’t trying to be WordPress and it wasn’t trying to be Drupal. It had its own feel. Components handled the big stuff, modules handled the smaller bits, plugins wired everything together. Templates were just PHP files and overrides, so you could bend it into shape without losing your mind. Coming from hand-rolled HTML and whatever spaghetti projects I’d built earlier, it felt like stepping into a proper workshop where all the tools were neatly arranged.

But the real surprise wasn’t the software. It was the people.

Joomla had this incredibly friendly, supportive community of developers, designers and site builders who treated newcomers like part of the furniture from day one. I’d ask a question on the forums at 11pm expecting silence and instead I’d get full explanations, code snippets, links to docs, and occasionally a gentle “you probably don’t want to do it that way” nudge. On Twitter, too, people just helped. No judgement. No snark. Just genuine encouragement from folks who’d been around the block and were willing to pass on what they knew.

Those conversations taught me more than any book or course could have. They shaped me during the early part of my freelance career, pushed my skills up several notches, and kept me moving whenever I hit a wall. And with that support, paired with Joomla’s flexibility and ease of use, I was able to build the foundations of a fairly successful business. I could offer powerful sites. I could build custom functionality. I could train clients without spending hours rehearsing explanations. It gave me confidence, and that confidence kept landing me work.

Over time, things shifted in a direction I’d never really expected. I started giving back. It started with a question asked on the official Joomla forums that, oddly, I’d just found a fix for myself. So I offered a solution. The poster tried it, it worked, and I felt pretty good about myself. And so, it continued. Answering other people’s questions on the forums. Sharing opinions, advice, little fixes. Posting tips on Twitter. Eventually I ended up building the first, and as far as I know still the only, Zurb Foundation based template framework for Joomla 2.5 and later Joomla 3+. That project grew legs faster than I’d anticipated, and it tied together everything I’d learned about Joomla’s templating system, responsive design and the quirks of Foundation. I’ll also admit now that it was more than a little “influenced” by RocketTheme’s Gantry framework, albeit much less polished!

Then came another surprise: being asked to act as a technical reviewer for the Joomla 3.5 Beginner’s Guide from Packt Publishing.

To go from asking beginner questions to helping shape a beginner’s guide felt surreal. Joomla had taken me from “I need a CMS that won’t explode” to “apparently I know things now”, and that was entirely down to the community and the opportunities that grew from it. It took a while to stamp down the imposter syndrome, I’ll tell you.

Of course, nothing stays still forever. Joomla slowed. WordPress surged. My own career path shifted when I moved into a full-time role at a company in Shropshire. Freelancing became a smaller part of my life. I started exploring other tools, other frameworks, other technologies. And gradually, without really noticing it happening, I began drifting away from Joomla.

But here’s the thing. I owe Joomla a huge debt of gratitude. Without it, I doubt I’d have ended up with the career I have now. I doubt I’d have met so many people who shaped my thinking. I doubt I’d have built half the things I built, learned half the skills I use today, or found the confidence to call myself a developer at all.

If I hadn’t stumbled onto Joomla back in 2011, I’d probably be doing something completely different now. And honestly, I’m glad things turned out the way they did.