About 6 years ago I was sitting in a lecture at the university. It was obviously one of those quite dry and boring lectures, and apparently not only for me. I noticed one of my fellow students of the course was creating his own website. I looked from time to time at his laptop and the software he was using for his site seemed very interesting. So I asked him directly after the lecture what it was.
It's Mambo he answered.

Sigrid and I spent the following days with Mambo and we were so excited, we started quickly searching for an application to use this great new CMS. At first we rebuilt our company Web site with Mambo. It went very quickly, and we had nothing more to do.

Then we came up with the idea to build a web site for our city, and this led to a problem. We couldn't find a good component for a Business Directory. Well, we are both software developers so we developed our own component. Ok, not quite, we rewrote an existing one. This was possible thanks to the Open Source license which the original component was released. We had moved to Joomla by this time, and the idea of Open Source inspired us alot, so we decided to share our component with the Joomla! Community under the name SOBI.

We released the first version of the SOBI component at May 25, 2006. So we are celebrating the 5th birthday of Sobi today.

After we published the original Sobi, people kept asking for additional features and we realized very quickly that the code structure of Sobi was not suitable to implement these features. So we decided to write now a completely new component. That's how Sobi2 was born a few months later.

Sobi and Sobi2 were designed to be used strictly as a business directory. But with the implementation of more new features, the different uses for Sobi2 kept growing.

Over time, it became possible to use Sobi2 for almost any kind of directory. The Sobi2 community also kept growing, and as a consequence so did the number of new feature requests.
Four years and many feature requests later, Sobi2 has reached its limit. New programming techniques and Joomla! versions made the development of a new component seem like the next logical step.
The result today is SobiPro.

Let's step back for a moment and take a look of what we have achieved:

• Sobi2 has been downloaded over 500,000 times to date. Unfortunately there is no statistics for Sobi.
• There are over 80 extensions available on the JED for Sobi2.
• There are about 91,000 posts in 22,000 Topics in Sobi forum.
• There are about 21,000 users registered in Sobi forum.

Not to mention one of the most valuable things we learned; the huge amount of experience we gained over that time. And I don't mean experience as developers, but the invaluable input from the users of Sobi.

For the last five great years we would like to say thank you.

Many, many thanks to all the great people who made this all possible. To people who helped us with Sobi development. To people who supported us in so many areas. To the great Sobi team, to our moderators in the Sobi Forum, to the Quality & Testing team. To the whole Sobi community and every single Sobi user.
And at last but definitely not least, thank you Joomla!

As a small gift we would like to offer a 20% discount to all Sobi2 addons and SobiPro Club memberships for the next three days using code "sobi5bday" in the Sigsiu.NET Shop.