IKEA is the world's largest furniture retailer. The company originated in Sweden and has now moved to the Netherlands. They designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, appliances and home accessories.

Like many of the world's leading companies, they use Joomla. Ikea's websites for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are both built in Joomla.

The Saudi Arabia site is in Arabic - it's great to see so many big organizations starting to employ Joomla for right-to-left sites.

5 years ago today, the very first version of Joomla was released.

The Joomla.org sites were unveiled on September 1st and just over two weeks later, Joomla 1.0 was made publicly available.

We had a full celebration of Joomla's 5th birthday on September 1st, but for the sake of nostalgia, here's the original blog post that launched the Joomla phenomenon. You can read people's reactions to the news in this forum thread. You'll notice there's no logo in the image below - that wasn't chosen for another week.

¡Feliz Bicentenario Mexico!

This is a time of celebration for Mexico. The country is commemorating 200 years since the start of its war of independence from Spain.

Mexico's third century is already off to a great start because the official government website for the event is running Joomla: http://www.bicentenario.gob.mx

Earlier this year we ran a series of interview on developers of very high-profile Joomla websites. Now in a new series we're talking with developers of normal business websites and interesting aspects of their work.

This week we're talking with Jesse Dundon from We Are Hathaway. They developed Slo-business.com for the San Luis Obispo, California, USA Chamber of Commerce.

Why did you pick Joomla as a platform for this site?

The client is a Chamber of Commerce with an annual budget set each year, so open source was a appropriate choice to squeeze in a web project without having to go back to the board of directors. It also allowed Hathway Tech to deploy the site in a fraction of the time it took to custom develop the site.

How did you persuade the Chamber of Commerce to use Joomla?

The chamber approached all of the local web development companies (there are at least 20 in our town) and asked for bids to build the chamber's new news website. The two requirements were that the website be built on a CMS and that the web developer use Open Source software that did not require excessive "hard" costs and recurring license fees. The Chamber employee in charge of the project was familiar with Drupal and as such initially suggested that as an option. We sold them on Joomla for a few reasons, namely cost, extensibility, features, quick time to deploy, and our own proficiency with the CMS.