mambo

The open source project MiaCMS announced that they and the project team behind the Aliro CMS are joining forces to create a best of breed and next generation CMS. For those folks that aren't familiar with MiaCMS, MiaCMS is a fork of Mambo. I was first introduced to MiaCMS while sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. Admittedly, Aliro is new to me. Aliro is a project that while appreciating the features and history of the Mambo family (including Joomla!) still saw a need to make some dramatic changes to the CMS architecture and modernize the code base.

While MiaCMS impressed me in 2008, I felt it was too similar to Mambo and was too far behind the Joomla! project to really stand out on it's own. At the time of the Packt open source award I thought MiaCMS needed to do a lot more to distinguish itself from Mambo and Joomla!. This is what I wrote:

Similar to Joomla!, MiaCMS is another fork of Mambo.  However, since the MiaCMS project is still young and the code in MiaCMS too similar to Mambo, I kept seeing MiaCMS as nothing more than a rebranded and improved version of Mambo 4.6.  Keeping within the "spirit" of the most promising category...it just seemed too early for me to put MiaCMS in the top three CMS.  Time will tell us whether MiaCMS will be its own fully supported CMS or only remembered as a fork under the shadow of Mambo.

I really want to revisit MiaCMS next year and compare it with Joomla! and Mambo.  If someone feels that I'm being too harsh on MiaCMS for being a fork of Mambo, know that I was just as harsh on the Joomla! project.  It really wasn't until the development of Joomla! 1.5 before I considered the Joomla! project truly legitimate.  As Joomla! has learned, it takes more than forking the code and opening a site  to create a legitimate open source project...it takes a community willing to change, evolve, and learn.  I think MiaCMS is on the right track, but it lacks the history needed to judge it fairly.

I think MiaCMS merging with Aliro is an amazing and gutsy step being made by both teams. The MiaCMS team appears to realize that in order to evolve into a much better CMS, they have to let go some of their past efforts in hopes of a new future. The reasons given for MiaCMS wanting to merge with Aliro says it all.

• Mambo is quite old at this point.  Releases, developers, and svn activity are all but non-existent, as alluded to in a recent interview with Chad Auld.  MiaCMS has given new life to the aging platform, but with the advancements in PHP and related frameworks over the last several years, the system is really in need of a full re-architecture building upon the lessons learned over the last 8 years.  While still with the Mambo project we announced such an effort several years ago, before the fork.  That effort was to be a Mambo rewrite on top of the CakePHP framework, but it never really got off the ground due to the political infighting that ultimately required the MiaCMS fork.
• So, here we are several years later with a much better system, MiaCMS, but still in need of a much larger architectural shift.  While we have advanced the upper layers of the system, Aliro has been focused on the all-important foundation.  Building on top of Aliro will allow us to better serve the community and put out a CMS that is even more impressive, efficient, secure, and flexible than the one you currently enjoy.

Initial plans is for the combined projects to use the name Aliro for their new endeavors. The MiaCMS core developers will begin focusing all new development efforts on the Aliro platform after the MiaCMS 4.9 release is out and stable. However, the team does plan to continue to support MiaCMS 4.9 with bug fixes and security updates.

Last week marked the official release of Magento 1.0, an open source ecommerce platform. Magento has been on my radar scope for some time thanks to those who have left comments about it here. Since, I likely will have need of a good shopping cart this year for a planned project, I've decided to put some focus on Magento. I will be removing Mambo from my top 30 "CMS Focus" list to make room for Magento. My apologies to Mambo fans.

Magento isn't just a "shopping cart" but attempts to also be an "ecommerce platform". Magento recognizes that it needs to improve and introduce additional features, but for a 1.0 version the variety and quantity of features are impressive. Some of Magento's well rounded features include analytics and reports, RSS feeds, site and content management tools, search engine optimization, promotion tools, and multiple theming.

Mambo 4.6.3 was released earlier today in recent weeks. Besides the usual security improvements and bug fixes, this version of Mambo came with some new enhancements. Some of the more notable enhancements in Mambo 4.6.3 include:

• Mostlyce upgraded to 2.4
• Mostlydbadmin upgraded to 1.5
• Geshi upgraded to 1.0.7.20
• Enhanced editor initializing
• Enhanced weblinks component, so the target param is not confusing anymore

Other features introduced in this minor version release include:

• Stability & security improvements
• Lighter database footprint
• A number of bug fixes
• Improved compatibility with older 3rd party extensions
• Added support for 4.5.x style SEF URLs
• Updates to many of the internal extensions
• MOStlyCE WYSIWYG editor enhancements (cross browser compliance issues addressed via an update to TinyMCE v2.1.0)