vision dead 2007

Joomla Jetstar CMS

An ambitious fork that tried to bolt social networking features onto Joomla back in 2007, before that was cool. Also known as CMS2go, it was built by a developer called 'webtrooper' and last updated in March 2014. The name aged poorly once a certain Australian budget airline became prominent.

What it is

An ambitious fork that tried to bolt social networking features onto Joomla back in 2007, before that was cool. Also known as CMS2go, it was built by a developer called 'webtrooper' and last updated in March 2014. The name aged poorly once a certain Australian budget airline became prominent.

The story

Jetstar CMS (also distributed under the name CMS2go) was registered on SourceForge in April 2007 by a developer using the handle 'webtrooper.' It positioned itself as "a full featured content management system, web portal and social networking engine" built on Joomla -- which was actually a somewhat forward-thinking concept for 2007, predating the social-everything era of web development.

The project targeted "Advanced End Users" and ran on PHP/MySQL on both Linux and Windows. Its latest release, "C2g-JetStar_20_Beta-1.zip," clocked in at 20.5 MB. The project even had its own website at jetstarcms.com (now defunct) and had a separate SourceForge files section for CMS2go releases.

Like Jeebles, Jetstar succumbed to the gravitational pull of the main Joomla project and the broader CMS market consolidation. Its last recorded activity was in March 2014, and it now has zero weekly downloads. The social networking angle was prescient but the execution never reached critical mass.

Timeline

Project registered on SourceForge

Jetstar 2.0 Beta 1 released

Last update recorded on SourceForge

Key people

webtrooper
Creator (SourceForge username)

Impact

Negligible, though the social-networking-meets-CMS concept was ahead of its time. Joomla itself would later add social features through extensions like JomSocial.

Lesson: Being early to an idea doesn't help if you don't have the team to execute it -- and maybe don't name your project after a budget airline.