The Agavi project was started in early 2005 as a fork of the then well-known Mojavi framework for PHP. Mojavi had gathered a pretty large community over the years, but the new version 3 didn't see overly active development and was, despite the open source license, not developed in a typically open source manner, i.e. with active involvement of and feedback from the community, or access to the main development repository, issue tracker and so on.

As a result, a couple of guys from Keller, Texas (namely Mike Vincent and Bob Zoller) forked Mojavi and labeled it Agavi (after the Agave plant which grows in the Mojave desert), with the main goal of creating a community-driven project with an open and transparent development process. A message with the fork announcement was posted on the Internet and in the Mojavi forums, and Agavi quickly gathered a small but loyal user base and more contributors.

The first version released to the public was 0.9.0, and as the version number implies, it was believed that a final 1.0 release could follow soon after that. It turned out, however, that there were other unresolved issues that had to be addressed, and so it wasn't until the end of 2005 that a new 0.10.0 version was released to the public.

While Agavi never had any official structure to its development team initially, the founders had less and less free time to spend on the project, and Bob ultimately made David Zülke "captain of the ship" as he put it in early 2006, and the decision was made to adjust the roadmap a bit, putting important features such as a routing and internationalization on the schedule for 1.0, since other frameworks, mostly inspired by Ruby on Rails, had begun to offer such functionality. A 0.11 release before a final 1.0 was planned in order to be able to make any changes, should they be necessary, before releasing a final 1.0 version to the general public.

In the end, 0.11 implemented a great many more features than originally planned, and as time went on, many of the core aspects of the framework, which was still heavily based on Mojavi 3, were changed drastically (so much in fact that at the time of this writing, many parts of Agavi do not resemble Mojavi much anymore). A lot of this work was necessary to prepare Agavi for the challenges frameworks face today and in the future; a solid, structured foundation is very important in order to be able to adapt to new developments and grow without having to introduce hacks or workarounds that would otherwise be necessary to introduce new functionality without breaking backwards compatibility.

Agavi 0.11 is what you see today. Soon after work on 0.11 commenced, it was decided that version 1.0 should be pretty much identical in terms of features, but with comprehensive documentation and everything a community would need after the launch. This "pre-1.0 release" was deliberately flown "below radar" in order to keep Agavi from getting wide public attention before the documentation was fully up to scale with the framework itself - everything else would have scared off a lot of people very quickly and thus possibly ruined the chances of ever getting a large user base.