Six years and six million downloads, Mambo still parties on

By Stan Beer
Sunday, 15 April 2007 17:48

Business IT - Technology

Mambo, the original open source content management system that powered iTWire: before we moved to its derivative fork Joomla, is now celebrating six years as an open source project under GNU General Public License. The celebrations coincide with the announcement of a new project leader and a reaffirmation of the project's commitment to put a sometimes turblulent past behind it and move forward.

For the past year, Team Mambo has experimented with a consensus-based decision process. However the egalitarian approach proved to be less efficient than initially hoped. So the decision was made to shift global project management into a more centralized structure with the appointment of Chad Auld as Mambo Project Leader.

We sat down with Ric Shreves, President of the Mambo Foundation to ask a few questions about the state of the union of the popular content management system and the community that supports it.

According to Shreves, the biggest challenges the Mambo project faces right now comes in the form of confusion in the market between Mambo and Joomla. Shreves believes this was largely due to a PR campaign from Joomla and ongoing activities from the unaffiliated commercial Mambo Communities site. We spoke to Shreves via Skype while he was sitting in his garden with a Mac in his lap in Bali

iTWire: Is it time to bury the hatchet with the Joomla crowd now that you're two different projects?

RS: I think so. The real problem people are mostly gone from there.

iTWire: you mean the original people have gone?

RS: Most have, yes. They have also finally cleaned up their site. No more references to being "a rebranding of Mambo" etc. Some people are still there and they've really downplayed the exits, but its been a bit of a bloodbath internally. Note the huge delays in (Joomla) 1.5 for example.

iTWire: So the people who are left are OK?

RS: The community is very large and 99% are oblivious to all this crap. I have no problem with those people. I do think it a shame that our early overtures to build consistency and standards were rejected out of hand, but hey...

iTWire: OK back to Mambo

RS: OK

iTWire: What is new and what is coming up?

RS: A couple of things. Immediately, 4.6.2 -- a bug fix release with some extras. 4.7 is very close as well and that will be a big step forward as we're shooting for nothing less than a fully accessible front end.

iTWire: Is everything backwardly compatible

RS: Backwards compatibility: (1) we've released an installable version of DOMIT to improve 3PD extensions compatibility -- we lost some when we removed that. (2) we're making some changes in 4.6.2 which improve compatibility -- all sort of 20/20 hindsight stuff there. 4.7 will have templating issues.

iTWire: OK - will 4.7 be backwardly compatible with earlier releases?

RS: Yes -- there will, however be issues with templates. Many existing templates wouldn't validate due to table usage, etc. Some 3PD extensions also would break validation. That does not mean you cannot run them, it simply means that using them might make the site something less than fully accessible. It's a presentation layer issue, nothing more.

iTWire: Is it a deliberate strategy to avoid the complete rebuild route that Joomla has decided to take?

RS: We've never viewed the Mambo codeset as requiring a complete rebuild. We've cleaned it up, tightened it up, published coding standards and are happy.
We're smaller and leaner now and benchmarking better. No need to re-invent the wheel.

iTWire: Your user base - has there been much leakage and has that stopped?

RS: The hemoraghing appears to have stopped and we seem to be regaining some ground. We've got a strong brand and we're in a lot of hosting consoles, so we always get people trying out the system.

iTWire: Are you getting people moving back the other way?
 
RS: A few. Nothing significant. There is an increasing dis-illusionment with the delays in (Joomla) 1.5, I think. We're going to live or die on the strength or our code and our support; not on whether any of our prodigy are successful in their own right.

iTWire: How many on the development team?

RS: it's always a bit of a moving target as people come in and out. I'd say the hardcore number less than a dozen and the part timers probably another 5 to 10. That's 5 to 10 active at any given time...

iTWire: Any major Mambo sites worth mentioning?

RS: Mercy Corps has been expanding their Mambo deployments -- that's a great organization to have in the catalog. We've also got Corporate Express doing a big roll out in Europe. French parliament is including Mambo in their commitment to Open Source. Oh and the Thai Police Force...

iTWire: Ric - when can we expect to see 4.7?

RS: Dev will kill me if I nail them down. Let's say "this summer". I hope to surprise you on that one...