I started my own business as a freelancer in 1983, developing software for IBM mainframes as well as for PC compatible computers and Amiga. There was not much about specialisation at that time.

In the second half of the 1990s, my customers got more and more aware of the cool new internet thing, and asked me to build a website for them. Never being afraid to learn new things, I built those sites. Pure HTML in the beginning, later with CGI scripts in different languages, mostly Perl, and 1999, PHP added to that list.

About 2003, some sites grew that much, that my build tool chain wasn’t satisfying anymore, when I had to add or update content for my customers. So I needed a CMS. There were a lot of them in the market, but since I nearly completely had moved to PHP, it should be a PHP based open source product. I did a market survey, installed and tested any PHP CMS I could get, and finally chose Mambo. Its concept of separate components, supported by modules and mambots convinced me.

I made half a dozen sites with it, discovering some of the flaws in Mambo. So some day, I decided to create my own CMS ‘nibraCMS’ (I heard, that every web developer has to go through this phase), which should be better in many regards, but ideally be able to run Mambo extensions.

We all know, what happened then, in 2005: Joomla! emerged as a fork of Mambo. Rumors about the goals of the new project told me, that they pretty much were the same as mine with nibraCMS, so I immediately cancelled my project and joined Joomla!.

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