The last significant version of MiaCMS was released this week. As I wrote several weeks ago, except for bug fixes and security updates, MiaCMS 4.9 will be the last version to be released by the developers. The MiaCMS core developers will now begin focusing all new development efforts on the Aliro platform.

I think the MiaCMS developers' attention toward the Aliro platform is a good strategic move. The developers likely recognized that the space for a content management system with Mambo roots was a little crowded. When I reviewed MiaCMS last year, I couldn't help but think it was going to be an uphill battle for MiaCMS.

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

On Monday, Packt Publishing announced the five finalists in each category of its 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  The five categories are Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  In the finals stage, the public as a whole is eligible to vote for each category through October 26th.  While that may seem like a long time for the polls to be open, I'd encourage you to vote early so that you have no excuse for why your favorite CMS didn't make it to the winners list.

Around this time last year, Packt Publishing announced the "top five" finalists for their award (no separate categories in 2006).  In 2006, those CMS projects that made it to the finalist list included Drupal, e107, Joomla, Plone, and Xoops.  When those five CMS were announced, I chose to double my efforts on covering those applications here at CMS Report.  Although the extra categories this year have brought quite a few more Open Source CMS into the foreground, I still don't see why I couldn't keep most of them on my CMS Focus radar scope.  With 16,000 people nominating their favorite CMS for this award, that amount of generated interest is hard to ignore.  Luckily, I already cover many of the CMS that did make it as a finalist...but there are still many new CMS on that list that will shake things up a bit here at CMSReport.com.

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)

• IE7 fixes
• RSS and  search engine optimization fixes
• com_syndicate config parameter fixed
• SQL injection fix in cancel edit functions

"Packt Publishing is offering an exclusive offer to all Mamboserver.com users. Purchase the newly released book (Dec 2006) 'Learning Mambo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website' and receive a 20% discount off the full price of the book (this offer is also applicable to multi-buys)."

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"Packt Publishing has published their third Mambo Book, Learning Mambo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website."

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"Corporate Express launched a series of 15 Mambo websites, covering the whole of Europe. "

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"Team Mambo has released version 4.6.1 and an SP3 version of the 4.5.4 release.

The release is a patch release designed to address problems in the following areas:

• The 4.5.4 patch/build fixes SQL injection and XSS issues.
• The 4.6.1 patch/build fixes the same, plus a number of minor issues found with 4.6 since its release on Sept 18.

Note that this patch does not address all the concerns raised with SEO and the Language Manager functionality in 4.6. Those issues are being discussed and will be the subject of a 4.6.2 release in the near future."

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It was announced by Joomla.org that the Beta for Joomla! 1.5 is expected to be released on October 12th. Some of the goals and features that are to be included in this new version of the content management system are:

• Substantial improvement in usability, manageability, and scalability. The project team's goal is to improve Joomla! "far beyond the original Mambo foundations".

• Expanded accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.

• Additional integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

• Enhanced content delivery, template and presentation capabilities to support accessibility standards and content delivery to any destination.

• A more sustainable and flexible framework for component and extension developers.

• Deliver backward compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.

Of all the features listed above, I would think organizations would be most excited about in Joomla! 1.5 is the ability to support remote authentication services such as LDAP. Most organizations would like to see their employees only have to log into their enterprise software once and not have separate user names or passwords to access e-mail, calendar system, groupware, and content management systems.

Mambo users rejoice! Mambo 4.6 was released on Monday this week. In August, we discussed the some of the new features and enhancements you can expect in this new version of Mambo. Mambo 4.6 is the first major release of the content management system in two years.

For more information on the new features and download links you can check out the official announcement posted at MamboServer.org.

I cannot stand-up for their services. I cannot tell you if they are legitimate. I cannot give you a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. If I can't tell you anything, why am I posting something like an advertisement for them? Well for two reasons: 1) they submitted a "story" and 2) they didn't try to spam this site with a comment. You get something for good behavior here.

We at Webzo.org Free Flash Tutorials would like to let CMSReport know that we have released a number of Mambo Flash Tutorials and are official partners of Mambo Communities. In addition we have also purchased MamboTutorials.net.

Webzo has also developed new tutorials for Simple Machine Forums and purchased smftutorials.com.

After much consideration we have decided to expand our empire and devote our selfs to new series such as OpenOffice.org Text Editor Tutorials, and new Outlook Express Tutorials. Webzo!'s Outlook Express series is currently on hold but will be starting again within the coming weeks.

Thank you,
Keith
Co-founder Webzo Flash Tutorials

P.S. Feel free to make comments about their services whether they be positive or negative.

"Team Mambo has just released Security Patch 2 for Mambo version 4.5.4. This patch fixes a number of security vulnerabilities and and provides some additional hardening of the application."

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