Timeline
A rough chronology of the software represented in this museum. Dates mark first release or the start of a program's mainstream adoption, not necessarily both.
| 2001 | phpBB 2 released. Developers unhappy with PHP-Nuke's direction fork it as PostNuke. |
| 2002 | PHP-Nuke reaches peak popularity as a news-portal engine. osCommerce gains traction among small online retailers. |
| 2003 | XOOPS forks away from a PHP-Nuke-derived codebase. Coppermine Photo Gallery becomes the standard self-hosted gallery. |
| 2004 | Mambo is at its most widely deployed. e107 gains a following among clan and hobbyist sites. |
| 2005 | Core Mambo developers fork the project; Joomla 1.0 is released. vBulletin 3 and Invision Power Board 2 dominate the commercial forum market. MediaWiki's MonoBook skin becomes a familiar sight well beyond Wikipedia. MyBB 1.0 is released in December. |
| 2006 | WordPress 2 ships the Kubrick default theme. Simple Machines Forum 1.1 and PunBB attract users seeking lighter alternatives to vBulletin. Vanilla 1.0 drops categories-first browsing in favour of a single list of discussions. |
| 2007 | Joomla 1.5 released. phpBB 3.0 "Olympus" ships in December with the new prosilver theme. The Mambo/Joomla template style becomes a common sight for small business sites. |
| 2008 | Drupal 6 released, widely adopted by universities, NGOs and technical organizations. |
| 2009–2012 | WordPress absorbs much of the simple-CMS and blogging market. Forum traffic gradually migrates toward Facebook groups and, later, Reddit and Discord. Several packages in this museum see their last major release during this period. |