Almost a year passed since Joomla became a real CMS. Now it’s time to make a little study to find if it’s still growing and if it’s more powerful than Mambo. A few days ago Google released Google Trends , a nice and helpful tool for webmasters. This study is based on searches made by regular users on Google. I must say that this tool has a small problem. It doesn’t show the number of searches (probably millions) but you will see that it give us a clue where Joomla is compared to Mambo.

Of course our first comparison is based on the name of CMS: Mambo vs Joomla. As you can see below Mambo has a descended trend over the last few months. Now, of course Joomla is rising because it’s new and it’s growing, but only one or two months ago Joomla received for the first time more search hits than Mambo. The descending trend for Mambo started exactly when Joomla was born and the descending trend is almost comparable to Joomla’s ascending one. On the graph the differences are small, but let’s make the search more specific.

Mambo templates vs Joomla templates. A lot of users search for new templates. I think this is one of the best keyword to show how Joomla is doing. Mambo templates keyword was searched for the first time in the early 2004. The number of searches continues to grow until in the middle of 2005 when there was the split between Mambo and Joomla. People searched in that period for mambo until the new name Joomla came into play. Now as you see, Joomla templates keyword grew very fast in number of searches, but Mambo templates started to fall. And now the Joomla Templates keywords have almost taken over Mambo Templates Keyword.

Mambo components vs Joomla components. Same with this, there are thousands of Joomla extensions/ components available and the number is growing every hour. This is not the case of Mambo. On the basis of latest surveys, the release of latest components for mambo has dropped to a huge number.