BuyHTTP Company Blog

Now that it’s been about a year since the last Mambo release (June 24th, 2008) it’s time to wonder about the future of the project. At one point it was hailed as the best open source project in the world, but now it seems to be dying a rather quiet death.

A Little Mambo History

The project started back in 2003 when Miro released an open source version of it’s commercial CMS, also known as Mambo. Many people have theorized they were just looking for coding ideas for their commercial CMS and seeing their actions a couple years ago it really wouldn’t surprise me. For a couple of years after being released Mambo was the most popular CMS available and beat our Firefox for the 2005 LinuxWorld Best Open Source Solution award. That was certainly a major feat.

Some time in 2006 Miro decided that the project had enough exposure that they wanted back in. A highly political (and apparently not very well liked) Mambo Steering Committee and Mambo Foundation was formed. This consisted of core developers, Miro staffers and Mambo community members. It was shortly after this that all core developers decided as a group to leave the project and start Joomla.

Fast forward to 2008 and there is a lot of work being done by the new developer group at Mambo. But the politics must have gotten to this group as well because they left and formed another new project, MiaCMS. Core developer Chad Auld wrote on his blog “We felt that the policies, processes, and priorities of the official Mambo Foundation were having a negative impact on the code and the community. Innovation, creativity, and team spirit have all but been eliminated. Trolling the internal forums has become depressing and de-motivating to say the least. Trying to push new code or even fixes to existing code into the core results in nothing except for long drawn out fights.” MiaCMS now appears to have a good future backed by very strong developers especially with their recently announced merger with Aliro.

Where Does Mambo Appear to be Headed?

There are still 6 people who appear to have write access to the Mambo core project on their file repository, so I guess it’s not officially dead. That being said I doubt we’ll see another Mambo release. I’d like to see it revived, but politics and code rarely mix.

Full Disclosure

In the sake of giving a little context to who I am, I have served as a Mambo core team member on the 3rd Party Standards and Guidelines team. I also started mambo-hosting.com almost 6 years ago and it was the first company in the world dedicated to hosting Mambo sites. I have had components I’ve written in the top 5 most popular downloads at the old MamboServer site. I have a lot of personal history tied into this project and really am saddened to see it come to an end like this. The good news is Joomla and MiaCMS are both going strong and appear to have bright futures.

The Joomla team is hard at work on Joomla 1.6. We thought this would be a good time to think of features that one might want to see in this new version.

Here are some ideas we’d like to see:

• Improved ACL. I know they are working on this and it’s the big news of the new release, but it still deserves mentioning.
• Improved search with suggested terms. When you accidentally search for “wbesite” on google you get asked if you meant to search for “website”. I actually wrote a keyword system back in the Mambo 4.5 days that had this feature. It was easier in that system because I was just working with lists of keywords and not all possible words (and languages), but with new technologies and the skills of the developers this could be doable.
• Improved extension installation. WordPress really blows everyone away on this. Their automated installer can’t be beat with anything out there now and it would be nice to see Joomla take a step in that direction.
• Improved upgrading. Again, WordPress has done this one well. Their one-click upgrade is a thing of beauty (other than the reported bug) and to see Joomla with something like this would be amazing. And no more migrating to go to a new version, that should just be common sense.
• Complete code security audit. This would be incredibly expensive, I realize, and probably not in the budget of an open source system like Joomla, but the number of issues Joomla sees compared to other systems is unusual. This is certainly due in part to the fact that Joomla is one of the more widely used systems, but also in part to the coding. Too many Joomla releases are fixing medium or high level security issues.

So that’s what we’d like to see. How about you?

There is a great plugin called WP Security Scan that will check several possible security issues on your WordPress installation, automatically fix some, and let you fix others. After installation there will be a new link in the wp-admin sidebar called Security. Click that and you’ll get your recommendations.

Right now WP Security Scan covers:

-passwords
-file permissions
-database security
-version hiding
-WordPress admin protection/security

Future releases will also address:

*one-click change file/folder permissions
*test for XSS vulnerabilities
*intrusion detection/prevention
*lock out/log incorrect login attempts
*user enumeration protection
*.htaccess verification
*doc links

There is a possible error when using the automated upgrade tool to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.

The Problem

If you get far enough in the upgrade process that the archive has been downloaded from WordPress and extracted and then hit an error (like bad permissions) WordPress is supposed to delete the new files. Instead it appears that it deletes all the files rendering your blog unusable.

Should BuyHTTP Customers Worry?

Thanks to our fully managed ownership/permissions system you should not run into this issue. Upgrading our blog using the automated tool could not have been easier. If you do run into this issue, thanks to BuyHTTP Data Vault you can restore all of your files in a matter of a few minutes and be back up and running. Then you can run a manual upgrade.

Follow this bug: Trac ticket # 10140

Found via WPEngineer.

Several Joomla template designers (here and here) are announcing their plans to stop supporting IE6 in their designs by Jan 1st, 2010.

We certainly welcome this news and congratulate these developers. IE6 is way past it’s prime (if it ever had one) and with Windows 7 being released soon fewer and fewer people use it every day.

If you’re still using IE6 we recommend Firefox, or even upgrading to IE8 that’s been out for a while now.