So we can be a hero, just like you, just like you… the higglytown heroes.

well that’s a snippet lyric from the children animated series Higlytown Heroes, the idea is to show to kids that you can be a hero on every jobs, from plumber to astronauts. And in the open source world, anyone can be a hero, since an application can be crafted from hundreds of programmer from every corner of the world.

But of course in every success stories there can be at least a name worth mentioning, the one that make all the differences, he can be the pioneer, the lead programmer or the mastermind. and in here i want describe few of them that successfully has made  web a much better place.

Matt Mullenberg-Wordpress Founder

Born January 11, 1984 in Houston Texas, Matt studied the Jazz saxophone during his time at high school for the performing arts & visual, which will answer your questions as to why all wordpress release code was named from jazz musician (e.g wp 1.5: Strayhorn, wp 2.0 : Duke, wp 2.1:Ella etc)

Matt start building wordpress when he was only 19 years old, with fellow developers Matt develop the most popular blogging CMS based on b2/cafelog blogging software where he used it to share his photos on the web.

Wordpress first released in 2003 but live behind the shadow of Movable Type, another CMS blogging platform popular at the time. A year after the relase, Movable Type made a radical price change for its CMS which opened up wordpress biggest break to take on the market, thousands of MovableType users move away to Wordpress and making it the most widely used blogging platform on the web ever since.

Wordpress is not the only open source project matt involved, he also work on numerous project which surrounds wordpress like Akismet, Ping-O-Matic, Gravatar, PollDaddy, bbPress, IntenseDebate, BuddyPress, WordpressMU, all of these build under his corporation: Automattic.

Some of the projects mentioned above was aquired from other developer by Automattic, some was handcrafted by Matt like bbPress which was coded few days during his holiday.

Although received heavy criticism on security vulnerability, wordpress has positioned itself as one of the most powerful open source Content Management System (CMS) available today and will continue to evolve in the coming years. Automatic was said to have turned down a USD 200 millions offer from investor to take over his realm and this has signaled how serious is Matt on his projects.

Dries Buytaert- Drupal Founder

Drupal started as a message board system in 2001, the word Drupal actually was first intended to be Dorp which means Village in Dutch, but Dries made a typo error to drop when trying to register the domain, and is happy to know that drop.org is available.

The original drop.org system died slowly, and the code later improved and become drupal, one of the most powerful open source content management system used for various kind of websites from blog, corporate, elearning to e-commerce.

Dries born in November 19, 1978 and already earned a Phd in Computer Science.at the University of Ghent Belgium. With his fellow drupal founder he created a startup company called Acquia, this company focus on becoming the commercial services of Drupal, similar to what RedHat has been to Linux.

Currently Drupal has become the center for hundreds of talented programmers where 900 programmers work around its core system, the CMS itself has 2000 contributed modules and have over 300.00 users registered on its official website.

Drupal is currently on it’s version 6 and the core team member are working intensively on its 7 version which according to Dries will consist tons of powerful new features that will have usability improvements to make Drupal easier to configure.

As a Phd holder, Dries has released several academic papers mostly on computer engineering, he also involved in some other projects such as Mollom, a service that prevent spams.

Martin Dougiamas – Moodle

Martin has been regarded as the Linus Torvalds (Linux Founder) of Learning Management System, the australian has put smile on millions of teachers around the world with his Moodle, a Content Management System for Education.

Martin is also a Phd in Computer Science where his research titled “The use of Open Source to support a social constructionist Epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry” which obviously played major role in his work on Moodle which equipped with lots of features necessary for e-learning system.

Moodle itself stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment and released on 1998 and has been translated into 61 different languages and used by over 49.000 registered websites.

Other CMS might be contributed by some of the world’s finest developer, Moodle is uniquely shaped by many teachers and lecturers around the world providing inputs and even code to make Moodle to reach its mature state.

Andrew Eddie & Johan Janssens –Joomla

Many heroes arise from Joomla CMS since it came into being as a spin off from other CMS, Mambo. The Project Leader Andrew Eddie was driving the CMS influential developer out of Mambo because he thinks the foundation that run Mambo violates some core values of the open source commitment.

Andrew lead the core programmer to teamed up and create a new project true to its open source nature and come up with Joomla. The name itself come from the Arabic word “Jumla” which means All Together or as a whole.

The first version of joomla was released on 2005 and went on to won Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007.

Johan Janssens was voted by the Joomla community as the most valuable person for his work on taking joonla to a new height; Joomla version 1.5.

Although Joomla lost the award last year to Drupal, it still considered as most widely used and rapidly growth open source cms today with millions of developer contributing.

Wide criticism on Joomla is the lack of user access management which the core developer promise to improve on their future 1.6 version.

These are only few of open source CMS heroes who contribute so much to the web that our gratitude might not be enough to thank them, and for hundred other heroes..  we salute you.