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 »
Monday, April 28th, 2008
I 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.
Posted in Blog | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
As 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.
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
MiaCMS was one of the Open Source projects that was presented at Thailand OSS Festival 2008. Love it. !!!
MiaCMS at Thailand OSS Festival (presented by Akarawuth Tamrareang, a.k.a Krit)
You can see the rest of the Flickr set here.
You can download the presentation from http://miacms.org. And see few surprising news too.
Posted in News | No Comments »
Friday, April 18th, 2008
moseasymedia, 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,
(more…)
Posted in Blog, News, Open Source | No Comments »
Saturday, September 8th, 2007
I 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.
(more…)
Posted in Bizzare Oddities, Blog, Stuff | 1 Comment »
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 »
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
In 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
Posted in Blog | 6 Comments »
