Re:If its so popular... (Score 1)

Joomla! 1.0 was exactly the same as Mambo (just look at the code and you'll see). On the other hand, Joomla! 1.5 has been completely rewritten from the ground up. It's coding styles and structure remind me a lot of Java for some reason... must be the whole JClass naming convention. However, they have adapted the MVC pattern to every aspect of the CMS now that it has made creating components and modules (with the new structure) quite more complex. The nice part of it though is that you can separate the interface and the backend pretty easily so that changes to the front end don't create changes for the backend (MVC pattern's goal). They have also added a nice API reference: http://api.joomla.org/ which makes developing a hell of a lot easier. If you just wanted to learn the basics of creating a Joomla! extension go here http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wiki /Itemid,32/. So far I like 1.5 but they have quite a few bugs to work out and there isn't an actual release yet so that makes sense as to why :).