Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards
Packt Publishing has anounced the winners in the 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS category of their annual competition. Silverstripe and CMS Made Simple took home first and second place. I am very happy report that MiaCMS came in 3rd place overall tied with another terrific Content Management System named ImpressCMS.
And also kudos to the master, Chad Auld, for being named in Packt Publishing’s 2008 list of “Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems“.
It is absolutely delightful to experience this kind of recognition for our project.
Posted in MiaCMS, News, Open Source | Comments Off
Monday, June 9th, 2008
MiaCMS 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;
http://miacms.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=46
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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 »
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Another cool gadget from Brilaps just hit the wires.
iMia is a web application focused on bringing a standard iPhone web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems. Yes, the iPhone does have a full web browser that is capable of displaying any site, so it is possible to use these content management systems without iMia. However, the experience is often less than appealing since users must constantly zoom in, zoom out, pinch to expand and contract, etc. As with most web sites and/or applications, these content management systems were coded with the desktop browser in mind. This is were iMia comes in…
iMia brings a simple web interface to the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! content management systems for iPhone users. The application is designed in accordance with the recommended iPhone interface design guidelines laid out by Apple. iMia makes use of the iui project’s fabulous efforts in this area.
Learn more on the product page here – http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=iMia.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, Mobile Tech, News, iPhone | Comments Off
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Very intuitive tutorial for Mambo template designs.
http://www.absalom.biz/tutorials/Mambo_Template_Tutorial.html
Posted in MiaCMS | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
After months of work, and a few unexpected delays, we finally closed in on the 4.8 release of MiaCMS.The Beta is out folks. Download it here, http://code.google.com/p/miacms/downloads/list and please do share your thoughts with us at http://forum.miacms.org .
The highlights of this release are; OpenID 1 & 2 support, content versioning, a brand new JavaScript architecture, a YUI Upgrade, an enhancement to the Related Articles module, a new version of the MOStlyCE editor, and plenty of bug fixes.
We owe a big thanks to the the Drupal project about the OpenID implementation, since most of it came from Drupal. Kudos to the fellow developers over there.
The official release of MiaCMS 4.8 should be out very shortly. We hope we’re gonna get some bug reports from the community before we pack it up for good.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, News | Comments Off
Friday, January 16th, 2009
MiaCMS 4.8 release bring OpenID support (versions 1&2), content versioning, a brand new and vastly improved JavaScript architecture, a Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) upgrade (from 2.5.2 to 2.6.0), an enhancement to the Related Articles module, new versions of the Byte&MOStlyCE editors, and plenty of bug fixes and other general enhancements.
I am proud to be a part of this project. In the upcoming days, we will have some very interesting news about the future of MiaCMS project.
Here are some important links around the 4.8 release:
- Release notes and screenshots – here.
- Official downloads – here.
- Upgrade instructions here.
Posted in MiaCMS, News | Comments Off
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
MiaCMS released a beta version of the next minor release of the project, version 4.9. The changes for this release are as follows:
General Changes:
- PHP 5 is now required (PHP 4 users must stay on the 4.8 branch until they can upgrade to PHP 5)
- Accessibility cleanup added
- PHPMailer upgraded
- Updated the MOStlyCE editor to latest TinyMCE core
- MOStlyCE support added for skins and content templates
- Added a new content bookmark component/module
- Added a new tag cloud module
JavaScript Related Changes:
- Fixed minor JavaScript issues identified with the 4.8 configuration
- Increased performance
- JavaScript now loads either in the document <head> or just before the closing </body> tag instead of scattered throughout the page; most of the time it will load just before the closing tag, since there are additional performance benefits to that method (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#js_bottom).
- Upgraded the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) from 2.6.0 to 2.7.0
Since the JavaScript architecture was fully rewritten with the 4.8 branch and again refined with 4.9, we’ve created a new starter doc on the wiki that details more about working with JavaScript (and YUI) within MiaCMS – http://docs.miacms.org/wikka.php?wakka=JavaScriptForDevelopers.
Posted in CMS, MiaCMS | 1 Comment »
