MiaChat 0.8.3 from Brilaps
June 9th, 2008If you’re a MiaChat user, you better hurry and upgrade to the 0.8.3 version. This minor release from Brilaps, updates the HTMLPurifier library included with the distro in order to bring you a safer ajax chat application.
Grab your mia-chat at http://code.google.com/p/mia-chat/downloads/list
*by the way, MiaChat is not related to, or an extension to MiaCMS
A new release from the hardworking team of MiaCMS
June 9th, 2008MiaCMS yet had another release a few days ago. MiaCMS 4.6.5 release has a few cool additions to it. Here is a list of things happened in the latest MiaCMS release.
The MiaCMS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 4.6.5. This release fixes old bugs and adds a good bit of new and/or enhanced functionality. In addition to the release itself we have launched the new miacms.org site and the redesigns of our forum and wiki.
Here are the release cliff notes:
1. Cache Fixes & Enhancements
2. Enhanced Statistics & Poll Result Charting
3. New Templates, Site Designs, & the Official Logo
4. External Library Updates
5. Enhanced Commenting & Akismet (Spam Blocker)
6. Performance Improvements & Dynamic YUI Loader
If you’re using MiaCMS 4.6.4, or a Mambo 4.6x family CMS, I would surely recommend you upgrade to Mia 
Here are a few screen shots;
Porting Controversy
June 7th, 2008Annabel Port of Geoff Show at Virgin Radio U.K. argues against a widely held belief every night. She sure is a MUST-LISTEN.
And some great reading from Annabel, as she is the Head of Showbusiness at the Geoff Show. Here…
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MiaCMS Interview on OpenSourceCMS.com
May 20th, 2008As the MiaCMS Team, we recently gave an interview at OpenSourceCMS.com.
Here is a tiny excerpt from the interview;
Chanh:
7) There is a plethora of open source CMS’s available out “there” for people to choose. Why should people consider MiaCMS?MiaCMS team:
Chad: The MiaCMS team is focused on producing an simple, yet powerful content management system. The team is focused on stability, security, innovation, web standards, performance, and our users. We are community focused and take pride in our product. MiaCMS is not a toy, an experiment, or a hobby. It is a robust CMS which can be used for sites of all types and sizes. Furthermore, MiaCMS has a very powerful extension system which can be used to develop custom extensions to enable functionality not found in the core by default.Cem: One of the good things that we inherited from Mambo is the mindset of “simplicity”. Can we make it simpler, yet better! We are working on it.
You can read more a http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?o…….08&Itemid=188
If you’re in the quest for an Open Source CMS, and don’t want to download/install a bunch of them till you decide, I would surely recommend that you visit OpenSourceCMS.com, play with the demos that they refresh hourly.
Unavoidable Fork Happened. How and Why ?
May 11th, 2008In the last month I had a few blog post about the “possible outcomes of Open Source projects in turmoil”. Indeed, all those messages were referring to Mambo CMS project, and the very Mambo Foundation. After refraining myself from all the Mambo Foundation duties (Core Team Lead, Translation etc.) in April 2008, I wasn’t planning to get my hands dirty with the core Mambo code for a while, but instead we (Chad and I) tried to revive the project externally by adding cool features like REST interface, Bridget the RESTful Yahoo Widget and such. Unfortunately, those didn’t fly well with the existing Mambo structure.
Seeing all our recent efforts go down in flames was one thing, and seeing a collective effort exceeding 10 years Mambo experience is another. The latter hurts more. So happened MiaCMS fork on May 11th, 2008.
Mambo’s most recent release 4.6.3 was on December 25th, 2007, and a few important bugs were immediately reported a few days after the release. Mambo Team fixed those in a short time, and Mambo 4.6.4 had been “release ready” since January 2008. And the Mambo wheels spun and spun and spun. The code has been in a stand still since than. Don’t ask me, I still don’t get it; and I was a part of that team. I am sad to admit, I was not able to make a difference with in Mambo Foundation. Too many battles to fight to make the product better. Unfortunately, I personally don’t have the time and patience for it. Plus, what’s the point?
Some insider information on how the fork happened. After Chad and I split from the Mambo Foundation, we’ve been going back and forth with the idea of the “fork“. Everytime one of us brought it up - after getting fired up on something happened in the Foundation- the other one shotting it down. The main reason for being indecisive about the fork was that; it is a pretty big thing to bite. During one of those discussions at the end of April, somehow we got on the same page, titled “let’s fork this thing”. Convenient timing indeed; Al Warren resigns from his new Mambo Core Team Lead position and Richard Peter Ong hops on our fork train. Rest is yet to be history.
April 29, 2008, we grab a snapshot of Mambo 4.6 from Mambo SVN (rev. 1688), roll our sleeves and start coding inside out. In 10 days, we have 200 commits in our SVN:fixed numerous issues, bundled the REST API, added a Sitemap Component and a Social Bookmarking module, revamp the entire Administration console based on Y! UI, (yes it validates almost in all Admin pages), added a new validating template based on Y! UI Grids, a brand new WYSIWYG Editor, probably many more that I don’t remember now. All those needed to be done for ages, too bad we just couldn’t do it with Mambo. At some point, we were so fired up on the outstanding silly validation issues, we even fixed the Installer.
Here we are on May 11, 2008, and I am a proud participant of the MiaCMS project. I already upgraded all my personal sites to Mia, and didn’t bi^%@#!ch about any problems back to the developers (I personally know the dudes who worked on it). Anyways, I love it. And I hope, Mia will grow into a big project with a loving and caring community.
You can find more information about MiaCMS at http://miacms.org (you’ll see the documentation, screenshots, forum links over there
*Chad also has his musings on http://OpenSourcePenguin.net
blog url change
May 9th, 2008A quick update on the blog URL.
I changed http://wp.ocszone.com to http://blog.ocszone.com . “wp” subdomain did stand for WordPress, and didn’t connect well with the current concept of the site. It was once intended to be a WordPress extensions demo site. Not anymore. I intend to use this site as a full-time blog. Thus the name change 
Constitutionalizing an Open Source Project and Possible Outcomes
April 28th, 2008I recently started writing this article study about Free Open Source Projects and their ways; internally and externally.
My initial goal was to analyze the internal and external dynamics of a FOSS project, especially constitutionalizing the internals, the identify the issues being faced, possible recommendations, outcomes and such.
Now, I am wiping what I’ve done so far, and opening this into a collaborative article. Feel free to add your opinions in the comments section. Once it’s ready to become an actual article/case study, I will contact the posters individually asking for their blessing about adding their pieces in the finalized paper.
Thanks in advance for your input.
An Informal Response
April 28th, 2008I recently across this post on http://forum.mambo-foundation.org. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the project after I stripped myself off my official Mambo Foundation duties. The post below is truly saddening and it’s not even funny for someone who has some idea of what’s going on inside.
Informal Survey - what can we do to improve the team and community?
In April 2001, Mambo became open source under the GPL - its our foss birthday month right now! Over time, and particularly in the last three years, Mambo has undergone a lot of changes. 2 1/2 years ago we went through the biggest change of all with the Joomla! fork.At the moment, the team is going through a restructuring so that we are set up properly to take Mambo forward into the future. The way the team worked in 2005 worked well for bringing Mambo back from potential disaster. We have made a few changes along the way but we know we can do better.
One of the things we are looking at doing is taking development discussions out into a mailing list that anyone can join and can contribute ideas to (and even code suggestions). Do you think this is a good idea? If you are a developer, would doing this encourage you to participate?
What else should we look at doing? Are there any barriers to your contributions that we may not be aware of?
The team works hard at being here, on the forums and part of our community. We want Mambo to be inclusive and friendly, and to encourage contributions. How can we improve this?
Share your thoughts here please (constructive only - we want this thread to be something of value that we can use for improving things, not an opportunity for criticism that would only discourage the team).
Since I do not want to discourage the team - or whatever is left of it - I prefer to vent here. For those who do not know already, Mambo Foundation lost three elected team leads in the last 4 months; and I am one of those folks who departed.
I’ve been an active member of the Mambo Foundation, QA & Release Team Lead at some point, and took over the Core Development Team Lead after Chad’s departure. Being known as a patient person, Mambo’s internal political dynamics even got to me, resulting in a not so nice resignation letter. Funny it is, I personally and with Chad collaboratively accomplished more than six months of work if we were to stay with the foundation, in a week.
Al takes over the reigns after my core team departure, and in less than a month, he gives up too. And knowing Al, his resignation letter was probably a bit more colorful than mine.
Now, let’s go back to the drawing board for a second and pop two questions.
Why would three Team Leads depart a big FOSS project in 4 months?
And why the board is still looking for a solution by doing informal public surveys?
I guess, we’ll all just sit tight and watch the fireworks.
Changing the MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla! Landscape
April 23rd, 2008Link exchange between the sites just don’t cut it anymore. “Cross-site information sharing” paradigm is growing into a greedy monster requiring new ways to expose your content. RSS has been holding up really good in that front. Given that you can put together - mash up- a website filled with thousands of articles in a matter minutes; it seems like, RSS over-accomplished its task. So what’s next ?
Today, core Mambo and Joomla! are both lacking good RSS facilities. You can only share your “Front page content” via RSS in Mambo (probably the same for J!). If you are keeping only one content item with some “never-updated-flashy” short content, your RSS feed is technically useless to the rest of the world. You can find a good RSS extension, which would cover that scenario.
Question
What if you want to expose more from your CMS site ?
Answer:
With the addition of the Brilaps REST API, MiaCMS, Mambo, Joomla! will allow for advanced external interaction. Meaning that interaction with the site and its content no longer has to occur directly through normal browsing methods. For the first time you can start to consume Mambo’s internals as external services via the data type of your choosing (i.e.) JSON, XML, or Serialized PHP.
How?
Brilaps REST API, MOStlyREST provides the com_rest as a base library that takes care of the message receipt and packaging back to the caller. Brilaps also released a few other goodies that goes along with the base implementation that the other 3rd party developers can use as samples or extend from those. com_rest_content and com_rest_stats components sit on top of the base component(com_rest) and expose your “top ranked”, “most popular” articles, or articles for certain sections/categories, or your site stats to any application that’s capable of parsing some simple XML.
Why?
Why do want to REST enable your Mambo or Joomla! site? One simple answer to that is, larger audience. Larger audience is both audience as in visitors and utilizing applications.
A few examples:
- You can have one MiaCMS site as a content repository, and expose parts of content to multiple other sites that you own. See the sample application, SMRC, to imagine different possiblities.
- You can have a widget like Bridget,
that you can distribute to your visitors to track or search your site at the comfort of a desktop application. - this list can go on and on, but I leave it up to the implementers and site owners imagination
Next?
I believe, REST enabled MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla! sites will change the landscape of the content management landscape covered by MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla!. Indeed, that’s a pretty large landscape. I guess, we just sit back and watch what’s gonna happen next…
For questions and comments about the REST API for MiaCMS, you can visit http://forum.brilaps.com
*Same article is also posted on Chad’s site; http://www.opensourcepenguin.net . If you’d like a take a peek at some other cool stuff, browse on.
moseasymedia 2.0.1 for Mambo, Joomla!, WikkaWiki Released
April 18th, 2008moseasymedia, a sort of well known video embedding extension in the Mambo Joomla! community, has a new release. moseasymedia 2.0.x version is released in mid April with a few neat features.
I’ll try give some highlights from the readme.txt that’s in the zip package.
Please read on,
Transfer Video to Tivo
April 12th, 2008I am not a big TV fan, but Chad’s recent article on OpenSourcePenguin.net might be valuable to some.
Written by Chad Auld
Apr 11, 2008 at 09:02 PMEvery so often I have the need and/or the desire to move some local videos on to my Tivo. These could be home movies, videos I have downloaded off the web via bittorrent, etc. I’ve messed with a variety of solutions over the years, but for my own records and perhaps for your benefit I thought I’d just document it here.
The tools I am using the most these days for this task are Galleon and VLC.
Galleon is a free open source media server for the Tivo DVR which allows you to enjoy many kinds of content and interactive applications right on your TV. The server runs on your home computer and organizes your media collection so that they can be viewed on your home network. Galleon also brings Internet content and applications to your TV.
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
……
The rest is here.
Mia Chat: A web based Ajax chat application.
March 26th, 2008
Today, Brilaps released version 0.8 of Mia chat -Ajax web based chat- application. Chad Auld states, “This release is stable enough for everyday use and has undergone a great deal of testing on the various popular platforms and browsers. We have been using it to do all our own chatting for months now and we’re loving it. We are nearing a 1.0 release, but have a few new tricks to try before then”. Mia Chat is released under the MIT License. For more information about Mia Chat go here.
Edit: Mia Chat and MiaCMS are entirely different applications. Mia Chat is a a standalone web application. It cannot be installed as an extension on MiaCMS.
Release of Mambo 4.5.6 - the end of an era
January 23rd, 2008The Mambo Team announces the final release of the Mambo 4.5.x series of releases. This marks the end of an era for one of the web’s most popular Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Content Management Systems (CMS). The enormous success of Mambo 4.5.x led to many forks, some successful, some less so. “Mambo 4.5 has been a great CMS, a good framework, and a great school to many of us”, says Ozgur Cem Sen, Core Team Leader of Mambo.
“We have been overwhelmed with the positive feedback we’ve received for the Mambo 4.6.x series, initially released over 16 months ago”, continues Mr. Sen. “We encourage all Mambo users to upgrade to the latest stable release of Mambo 4.6.”
During the last several months, the Mambo Team has been working very hard on the upcoming Mambo 4.7, as well as maintaining and doing minor development on Mambo 4.6.x. The Mambo Team also has been discussing Mambo 5. “It is time to look forward, and focus our efforts towards growth”, says Nicolas Steenhout, Secretary of the Mambo Foundation, Inc.
Project Leader, Chad Auld says that this is both a sad and an exciting time for Mambo. “It is always sad to see software reaching the end of development,” Chad says, “Mambo 4.5 has been with us for many years”. He adds, “Mambo 4.5’s time has passed and Mambo is moving forward to an even better future. With 4.7 getting closer to release and planning under way for Mambo 5.0, we have exciting things coming.”
Team Mambo supports those sentiments and wishes to thank everyone who contributed to Mambo 4.5. This is an exciting step forward for Mambo and one which the Team hopes will be supported by the community.
Farewell Mambo 4.5!
What’s Changed?
1) Hardened security.
2) Updated mod_templatechooser to improve security.
3) Fixed a small issue with the PDF code.
4) Fixed a PHPMailer issue
5) Fixed login and logout redirection issue.
Mambo 4.5.6 is code named “Sunset”.
You can download Mambo 4.5.6 from the Mambo Code forge here:
http://mambo-code.org/gf/project/mambo/frs/?action=FrsReleaseView&release_id=304
While there, you may like to click on the link to the forge sponsors site. Every project hosted on the forge is offered free hosting for the project on BuyHTTP and they have some good deals going for Mambo hosting too. Support for our sponsors directly helps the Mambo project.
If you have any reminiscences or thoughts to share about the sunset of the Mambo 4.5 branch you can discuss them here: http://forum.mambo-foundation.org/showthread.php?t=9843
StarvingEngineers.com In The News
December 10th, 2007StarvingEngineers.com made the news. Gotta love the publicity
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22179829/
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=800971
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/071210/0337520.html
http://hosting.phpmagazine.net/2007/12/simply_hired_signs_distributio.html
and more….
| Press Release | Source: Simply Hired |
Simply Hired Signs Distribution Deal With Go Daddy to Expand Publisher Network
Monday December 10, 6:00 am ET
#1 Domain Registrar, to Offer Millions of Customers Job-a-matic to Monetize Their Sites
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(MARKET WIRE)–Dec 10, 2007 — Simply Hired, operates the world’s largest search engine for jobs at www.simplyhired.com, while also providing job board technology to thousand of publisher sites. Simply Hired will quickly expand their publisher network through a prominent distribution deal with Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar. Through this partnership, Go Daddy is now able to offer their millions of hosting customers the opportunity to monetize their site while seamlessly integrating valuable content into their hosting platforms.
When Simply Hired approached us about offering their free Job-a-matic product to our hosting customers, it was an easy decision,” said Vice-President of Technology Michael Chadwick. “Go Daddy provides a one-stop shop for individuals and businesses to easily establish an online presence. Using Go Daddy Hosting Connection, our customers can take their site to the next level by monetizing it and quickly adding relevant job content.”
The Simply Hired Job-a-matic product allows Go Daddy hosting customers to instantly add a free job board to their site and to utilize a suite of tools to easily customize and monetize their site while providing users with a seamless experience. Another feature of the Job-a-matic product is the quality backfill of relevant jobs coming from the Simply Hired database of more than six million jobs, so the job board will always look full.
“We view Go Daddy as a significant distribution channel for our Job-a-matic product, complementing our existing network of more than 3,000 publishers,” said Simply Hired’s Co-Founder and CEO, Gautam Godhwani. “By coupling our easy-to-use technology and extensive job database with Go Daddy’s flagship brand and massive customer base we are set up to enjoy a very successful and long term relationship and we are pleased to see the positive feedback we are already receiving from Go Daddy customers.”
“We recently published a technical site for engineers and incorporated Job-a-matic into the content of our site after coming across it on GoDaddy.com. The Simply Hired job board technology makes our site look very neat, elegant and most importantly simple and it will provide more value within the context of our site,” explained Ozgur Cem Sen, www.starvingengineers.com.
Contact:
For more information, please visit:
http://www.simplyhired.com
or http://www.jobamatic.com
http://www.GoDaddy.com/WebHosting
Media inquiries, contact:
Julie Craft
510-295-3935
StarvingEngineers.com launched
November 18th, 2007OCS Software Solutions launches http://StarvingEngineers.com as a job market place for many engineering disciplines.
Throughout 2007, job postings will be $5 for 30 days.
Four C’s of Innovation
October 20th, 2007Just some thing flashed on my mind the other day.
- Creation
- Creativity
- Chaos
- Compliance
Don’t you think, almost anything you can think of goes through those phases?
SemanticWebFeeds.com launched
October 15th, 2007I launched semanticwebfeeds.com in Oct. 2007. The web site is intended to be a feed repository of Semantic Web related websites.
From a technical perspective, a Google Reader style Ajax RSS feed reader is the main attraction of the site.
The site was initially built on top of http://sementicweb.com, after a typo accident.
All Over The Place
September 25th, 2007I recently got a snapshot of ocszone.com ’s visitors.
We technically have visitors from all the livable continents of the planet.We don’t have visitors from the Arctic but so what!!! The scientists have better things to do other than visiting ocszone.com
That’s really amazing.
*that’s only a 500 plot snapshot of Sept. 2007 visitors.
Profanity in Open Source
September 8th, 2007I recently received an email from one of registered users of the ocszone.com
The email follows;
| from a user…. |
| At Joomla Extensions it is said that moseasymedia is free,but here at your download you demand credit card details and want to chargeThis is bull shitI’ll fucken tell everyone I can about your con
fucken piece of shit |
This email is obviously from someone who does not know what GPL means. Indeed, let me rephrase; from someone who does not know how to read.
ocszone.com clearly states - in multiple places- that the software we develop and distribute is free of charge unless stated otherwise. Most of those notices are in different colors and bold, so that they will be eye-catchy. And we do NOT demand any private and financial information.
