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At this time of year it is traditional to take stock of the past year and to think about the future. For Mambo, it has been a pretty dramatic year. For Mambo, 2005 brought with it disputes leading to a complete change of the development team and the spawning of a rival system, but it also brought a number of positive achievements, several of which are likely to have much greater impact next year.
During the first half of the year Mambo was a feature rich and generally very stable system, culminating in the 4.5.2.3 release which many people have relied on for quite some time. The second half of the year saw almost everything change, but also laid the ground for future Mambo development.
Although the loss of an entire development team was a setback, the Mambo community is both large and deep and the project has succeeded in attracting a group of experienced developers who believe strongly in the project and have ideas for substantial further progress. The new team’s first requirement was to achieve sufficient grasp of the existing code to be able to maintain it. This was achieved by the end of November, when 4.5.3 was released to fix a large number of small bugs and a few security weaknesses.
For many people 4.5.3 has been solid, but a few issues crept past the development team. Moving away from extensive use of globals always carried some risk, and a few problems were created. Also the sudden growth of MySQL 5 with hosting providers showed up a few issues. Since not everyone is affected, the team decided to create a patch, which will be available around the end of 2005. The aim is to address one of the most common requests we hear from developers and webmasters, that is to keep releases viable for longer, with patches available for those who encounter problems.
On the organisational front, 2005 saw major changes as Mambo moved to become an independent entity. Created by Miro, who released the code into open source almost 5 years ago, Mambo had previously relied on Miro to provide ongoing organisational stability. With Mambo becoming a major force in the world of open source content management systems, it needed its own corporate existence, separate from its founders or any individual. Simply put, Mambo had outgrown being run as an ad hoc project and demanded a more formal structure to realize its full potential.
The Mambo Foundation has been created as a non-profit corporation, which now has ownership of the intellectual property relating to Mambo. There is still much work to be done to ensure that the Foundation evolves into a vibrant and effective organisation, and that process will certainly continue well into 2006. Beginning in Q1of 2006, the community will be asked to participate in a series of open discussions concerning the revision of the Foundation rules and procedures, with the goal of encouraging the membership to take an active part in shaping the Foundation.
The software will also be making great strides in 2006. Although a lot of effort went into fixing bugs for 4.5.3, at the same time the team was working hard on designs for future development. In the early part of 2006 there will be release 4.5.4 which will continue the results of the consolidation process. As the release numbering suggests, it will not contain major new features. But it will go much further than simple bug fixing, with many parts of the code being completely overhauled. Much of this work is already done but a great deal of testing remains to be done. The code review will have the immediate benefit of improved speed and efficiency, and is also a step towards substantial functional changes. It will retain substantial backwards compatibility.
Also currently under development is release 4.6, which is planned to include significant new features. Version 4.6 will see a comprehensive approach to internationalization, including the client side, the admin side, and the content. It will also include a completely new role-based access control scheme. Many other smaller features are under consideration for inclusion in the release plan, which will be firmed up early next year.
There will be a number of moves to improve the Mambo environment for developers. More hooks for Mambots will be provided, and the interface to Mambots rationalised and improved. Standards will be established to effectively control the split between logic and presentation. In general, clear OO interfaces will be provided and documented for developers, while globals will be eliminated.
Perhaps the most exciting is the potential for Mambo version 5 which we would like to see in at least early versions by the end of 2006. With many hosts taking a sudden leap forwards, it now looks feasible to build Mambo 5 to tie up with two other version fives – PHP and MySQL. These will be prerequisites for Mambo 5, allowing the development to make use of powerful features only found in the recent releases. While they are not yet fully stable, we expect that issue to be resolved. MySQL 5 will be important because of features such as views and stored procedures, but although it is likely to be a prerequisite at the launch of Mambo 5, the design will aim towards database independence from the start. PostgreSQL and the major commercial databases will be priority targets. This work may also feed back into Mambo 4.
PHP 5 will enable Mambo 5 to fully exploit OO techniques with significant benefits for the robustness of the code. It will also help in the building of robust mechanisms for handling units of code that will be inherently more secure than can be achieved at present. Efficiency gains will come from smart code loading mechanisms. Familiar popular features of Mambo will be retained, and interfaces will not be deliberately undermined. But a major release is an opportunity to break with history to some extent, and the role of plugins is being fundamentally reviewed. Again, one important aim is to provide a powerful and congenial environment for third party developers.
A paper describing the outline design of Mambo 5 will be prepared in the early part of 2006. It is not envisaged that Mambo 4 will be immediately rendered obsolete by Mambo 5. The maintenance of the earlier version will continue as long as there is significant demand for it. At both levels, Mambo will be making its own components more readily detachable. There is no reason why there should not be third party components to handle contacts, banners or even general content.
This report has deliberately avoided giving precise dates. The team will continue its policy of engaging in short, medium and long term developments in parallel, and releases will be planned in detail as we see ideas maturing. More specific plans will appear early next year. The aim will continue to be to set achievable dates, although it is never possible to give absolute assurances. In all of these developments, the aim will continue to be encapsulated in the Mambo slogan “Power through simplicity” with as much effort going into streamlining interfaces as into new features.
We hope everyone using Mambo is getting as much pleasure from its use as we are from being involved in its creation, and wish you a very happy holiday season. |
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