Posts for the ‘MiaCMS’ Category
Monday, April 28th, 2008
I 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).
link to the post
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.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Link 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.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, News, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
The JCD-A is an alliance of commercial developers for Joomla/Mambo and Elxis. It has been set up to encourage developers of commercial extensions for the Mambo family of products to get together and discuss issues that are pertinent to them in their roles.
http://jcd-a.org/
Posted in MiaCMS, Open Source | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
The Mambo Foundation is a non-profit corporation formed in August 2005 to serve as a supporting organization for the Mambo Open Source Project. The purpose of the Foundation is to provide support and protection for the development of the Mambo software system. We are modeled after similar ventures, such as the Eclipse Foundation and the GNOME Foundation.
- The Source: Containing downloads of the Mambo CMS core and additional information. Visit The Source at source.mambo-foundation.org
- The Foundation Forums: Providing a Forum site for members to meet and discuss issues of concern to the community. Visit the Foundation Forums at forum.mambo-foundation.org
- MamboLove: A viral marketing campaign to promote the use of Mambo. Visit mamboLove at www.mambolove.com
Posted in MiaCMS, Open Source | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Very intuitive tutorial for Mambo template designs.
http://www.absalom.biz/tutorials/Mambo_Template_Tutorial.html
Posted in MiaCMS | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
The 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
Posted in MiaCMS, News, Open Source | No Comments »
