• Registered: 2008-09-04
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Suggestions for features

First I must say that I am not at all pleased with all this forking and spawning that you web CMS implementors are constantly doing. There seems to be no other types of open source projects that has the same frequency of splitting and forking. I am not saying that the reasons that you felt compelled you to do it are invalid. I am just saying that as a Mambo user for many years I get confused, unsecure, and more inclined to look at other CMS:s, every time this happens. The instability that is the result also affect the usefulness of the CMS:s. For example the multi-language component MambelFish has been on the top of my wish list for 5 years. It just started working for Mambo, when Joomla split off resulting in an incompatible JoomlaFish. I didn't want to switch because of other incompatible changes, so I was left with no multi-language support. Nookaew woke up and has recently started to work, when MiaCMS is split of. Furtunately Nookaew seems to be determined to stay with the Mambo-line. The same goes for different components for files, documents, calendars etc. etc. In short, it seems that a stable product could grow in features and user support, where as constantly splitting off always sets the product in a state of less features than it started out with.

So, in order for MiaCMS to become *my* CMS, it needs to show a stable set of add-on components supporting at least mult-language, calendar and file repositories. I could detail these if anyone is interested.

As a last comment, there where some indications on the MiaCMS web site that the forums would welcome any suggestions for features and improvements, but the forum index does not have any topic that corresponds to this indication. So I suggest a new topic, "Suggestions for improvements and features".

I appreciate the work that you all put into this, I'm a OS-developer myself, so I know... This time I just articulate what I feel as a user of the Mambo-family of CMS.

  • Registered: 2008-08-03
  • Posts: 1

Re: Suggestions for features

Your attitude is understandable, but I'd like to give a little background and a few comments.  First, it seems to me that spin offs from Mambo have come about for two main reasons.  The positive one is that Mambo evolved to be a very fruitful system - its design met people's needs and it provided an appealing platform for extension development.  The negative one is that the organisations behind Mambo have been plagued by politics - sometimes linked with money, sometimes with personalities.  The positive factor means that people who leave the Mambo project on account of political factors are still motivated to build on the Mambo heritage, created by past open source developers.

I was leader of the Mambo development team immediately after the Joomla team left, and worked with some of the people who are now leading developers of MiaCMS,  along with other talented developers.  We believed that Mambo still had a future.  We believed it could and should innovate but also espouse standards.  In fact, we proposed to Joomla work on a common standard for the extension API, but that was rejected.  I left the Mambo project back in 2006 - not over any technical issues, but on account of the politics.  Chad stayed on and did further valuable work, until he reached a situation he found unacceptable.  Meanwhile I wrote a new CMS called Aliro (http://aliro.org) and wrote a book about PHP5 CMS framework development.

On language support, it is important to emphasise the quality of the innovative work on language that was pioneered immediately after the Joomla split by Carlos Souza, who built the gettext based system that is now in Mambo, MiaCMS and Aliro.  Despite some doubters, I still believe this was a very positive move that is a solid base for further development, including support for multilingual content.  Developer resource is the main stumbling block to more rapid progress.

Also, I can guarantee that barring unforeseeable disasters, the Remository file repository, which I develop, will be fully supported on MiaCMS.

While it may be regrettable that there are so many different CMS platforms, one direction that I believe is fruitful is the adoption of standards.  My own direction is now much influenced by looking at the best of what is being implemented in other systems, seeking to adopt it and ideally make it into a standard that can be followed by every CMS.  That seems to me very much in the spirit of open source where each project builds on the best of the others.  And I believe the MiaCMS developers feel much the same.  It's possible to find positives in the recent history of the Mambo based family, and I hope that those will dominate in time.

  • From: Florida, USA
  • Registered: 2008-05-12
  • Posts: 88

Re: Suggestions for features

Hi Martin, nice to see you around here!

Hi Thomas, I also, like Martin, understand your point of view.

To share my thoughts, when the devs left Mambo back in 2005 and formed Joomla, they took everything and everybody with them and when they left they also took the idea of a CMS dependent on 3rd party extensions and have been very successful at it. This was their creation, this is now in Joomla.

Joomla is totally dependent on 3rd party extensions. The stand alone CMS has not much to offer, as a matter of fact, do a Google search for Joomla reviews and almost all are on a very negative side. There many, many good open source CMS out there, but none have that massive 3rd party development. So that makes Joomla very attractive.

But that is Joomla's thing and the forks should not try and compete with that.

Mambo was left wihout anyone, nobody, nothing, Peter Lamont was left by himself and then slowly other people including me started joining the project and it continued. BUT! it should've taken a very different road right then and there and it did not. It continued the same path as Joomla and I believe this is why Mambo is where it is right now. I has taken baby steps forwards. Mambo has gone off the charts and when Martin proposed the idea for the extension API, I told everyone that the guys in Joomla would completely reject that which they did, why? because that's THEIR thing. Get it??? They don't want to share their glory, their strongest point!

Right now, most if not all 3rd extensions for Joomla 1.0 work with Mambo and Mia, but it's a matter of time before that is all over. Joomla's 1.5 version is taking care of that and the more Mambo and Mia develops and develop apart from each other, the faster and the more 3rd extensions will not work, unless 3PDs continue dev work for future Mambo and/or Mia development. 3PDs rarely develop for more than one CMS, this is very rare and I really don't see any of the 3PDs leaving Joomla.   And in the past three years, since Joomla was formed, I haven't seen any major 3PD in Mambo.

I don't know where Mia is going, I don't know their plans. If they are going to follow that same Joomla 3DP-dependency-path then Mia will be just another fork in the bunch.

Chad, Al, Arpee and others, you guys forked. I hope you fork away completely and make a truly good, powerful CMS.

IMHO, a CMS should have some basic components, like a forum, gallery, comments (which you guys already have), a better contacts component, something that you can add fields to (user friendly), forms, and perhaps some others. Not too many of them, but enough to break away from that awful 3PD dependency.

And for those devs who are probably saying, "God no, that is too much work, we can't possibly do all that", NONSENSE, yes you can. I have been around this since 1998 and I have seen in some projects where 1, 2 or 3 devs do full blown cms all by themselves with many features.

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  • cauld
  • Administrator
  • Offline
  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-05-02
  • Posts: 599

Re: Suggestions for features

hazman wrote:

And for those devs who are probably saying, "God no, that is too much work, we can't possibly do all that", NONSENSE, yes you can. I have been around this since 1998 and I have seen in some projects where 1, 2 or 3 devs do full blown cms all by themselves with many features.

Too much work... nah.  I've spent the last few months rewriting almost the entire JavaScript implementation for MiaCMS 4.6.6.  Now that was a lot of work cool

The fork, well we explained it as best we could.  I'd rather not go down that path again.  Here is the official story and here is my own.  Four or five months have passed since we forked and I am still happy with our decision.  Version 4.8 will be our third step in the right direction.  As for the future... we are following no one. We are open to working with other groups, we look to any developer for great inspiration, but ultimately we are forging a new path.  We have our own plans and we will execute them as best we possibly can.  We have some exciting stuff going on and you can be assured the future is bright.

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