I recently answered this question on Quora. I feel I came across a tad more aggressive than I intended. I think it’s clear I’ve had some pent up frustration with the Joomla project and community.

There’s also a little back and forth between myself and Amy Stephan (Quora | Twitter) in the comments of this answer as well which flesh out my opinion on the current state of Joomla and where the project is lacking.

It’s frustrating because I really liked where Joomla was headed originally. I honestly didn’t believe that forking Mambo was the best long-term idea, but it gave the project a huge initial push from an enthusiastic community who was eager to make something of the stagnate Mambo project.

After an initial burst of code and some major releases advancement seemed to wane and it’s been very nearly 3 years since the last major release (1.5). In that time projects like Drupal, ModX, Expression Engine, and many others have blown past and are maintaining good momentum and seeing steady community growth.

I feel many developers simply aren’t very excited about working on Joomla, and I feel it’s the Mambo fork that is to blame. While it did give Joomla a great burst of users at the start, the horrible job of refactoring Mambo into a more modern platform is far more laborious than it’s worth.

Also it’s not just old code that hurt Joomla, but rather old, outdated site management metaphors inherited from Mambo. Most people aren’t publishing old style news site portals anymore. We’ve long left the days where things like PHPNuke portals were commonplace.

Amy maintains that the forthcoming 1.6 release will “leap frog” projects like Drupal due to its long incubation. It remains to be seen if this will be the case, but I wish them all the best - the more options that exist in the open source CMS arena, the better.