vision dead 2007

Joomla Joostina CMS

A Russian-focused fork of Joomla that tried to build a CMS tailored for the Russian-speaking web. It maintained some compatibility with Joomla extensions and had releases through at least 2011, but eventually fell silent. Peak obscure CMS energy.

What it is

A Russian-focused fork of Joomla that tried to build a CMS tailored for the Russian-speaking web. It maintained some compatibility with Joomla extensions and had releases through at least 2011, but eventually fell silent. Peak obscure CMS energy.

The story

Joostina emerged from the Russian Joomla community around 2007, driven by developers who wanted a CMS that better served Russian-speaking users. The project maintained backward compatibility with Joomla 1.0 components and modules, making it relatively easy for existing Joomla users in Russia to migrate.

The fork included a WYSIWYG editor, RSS/XML support, and various customizations aimed at the Russian market. Development continued through at least November 2011, when version 1.3.0.5 was released. The project had its own community at joostina.ru and later established a presence on GitHub.

Like many regional CMS forks, Joostina struggled to maintain momentum once the original project (Joomla) improved its own internationalization support. The project appears to have been abandoned by the mid-2010s, with its GitHub repository showing no meaningful recent activity. It remains a curious artifact of the era when localizing software sometimes meant forking the entire project.

Timeline

Joostina forked from Joomla for Russian-speaking community

Version 1.3.0.5 released

Development effectively ceases

Impact

Minimal. Served a niche Russian-speaking audience during a period when CMS localization was harder than it needed to be.

Lesson: Localization forks have a built-in expiration date -- once the upstream project properly supports your language, the fork loses its reason to exist.