http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/11/joomla-quietly-crosses-23-million-downloads-now-powering-over-2600-government-sites/

So what is this “Joomla”, and why should you care about it? Joomla is a free, open source CMS, written in PHP that uses object-oriented programming, storing data in a MySQL database, and does page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search — things that every CMS should do.

And there are these impressive statistics: Joomla has now passed 23 million downloads, and currently stands at just over 23.5 million, to be precise. It owns 10.3 percent of the CMS market share, and BuiltWith shows it’s powering over 1.4 million websites. Joomla, for one, says that it’s impossible to know for sure, but estimates last year by FinishJoomla put that number between 1.5 and 2 million. Which admittedly seems small compared to the 23 million downloads.

Pure statistics are fine and dandy, but what’s led Joomla to become the second largest CMS on the Interwebs? This is an especially interesting question considering that, as an open source system, there is no figurehead or CEO pulling the strings, or making product decisions. Joomla is updated and expanded on, like WordPress(.org) and Drupal, by its community of developers. But unlike Matt Mullenweg of WordPress (who, incidentally, was named one of the 50 most important people on the Web by PC Magazine) there is no “face” of Joomla; instead, it has been collectively run by the nearly 250K developers that use Joomlacode.org, the resource in which developers can build open source software projects, tools and extensions, for Joomla users. (And there are currently nearly 8K extensions available for the Joomla platform.)