Mambo

Development Update - ver.4.6

Happy (Chinese) New Year everyone. Team Mambo welcomes the Year of the Dog (loyal, hardworking and true!) with this update on development.

Currently under development is version 4.6 of the award winning Mambo Open Source Content Management System. Version 4.6 is a minor version release, Mambo’s first in well over a year (the last was 4.5). While the system does include some new features, the real revolution is in the underlying code base where a major overhaul of the code results in a leaner, faster Mambo with improved performance and stability.

Internal testing is being done now, with the first 4.6 release candidate expected in mid-February. Once feedback from testing is received, the team will work towards a final release of 4.6. The earliest reasonable date for a final release would be the end of February, but until RC1 is out in the wild, it is impossible to commit to a firm date with any confidence.

What should you expect from 4.6?


User features

A faster, cleaner Mambo, with more potential for future development. While all sites will see performance gains, large sites with high activity levels will notice in particular improved load handling and fewer bottlenecks.

Internationalization of interfaces is improved by institution of a single standard mechanism. Mambo will now follow the main trend in open source development, which is to use gettext. The mechanism will make it easier for translators to produce local language packs.

Better Search Engine Optimization improves avoidance of server load problems and provides much better handling of bad URLs by means of 404 errors. This will improve the effectiveness of SEO in relation to search engines. An optional sef_ext.php for content will also be available.

Totally new integrated installer for plugins (components, modules, etc). Users will see a single installer which is able to install any kind of plugin. 3PDs can create compound packages containing a mix of components, modules and Mambots which users will be able to install as a single .zip file.

New, better WYSIWYG content editor. 4.6 includes the full featured WYSIWYG content editor, MOStlyCE, which is a new tool based on TinyMCE and mosCE. MOStlyCE is powerful, fast and includes a number of new functions; it is a major step forward in content management.

New RSS newsfeed reader that is both more efficient and more powerful.

Improved site search. The search option will now use stop words correctly to filter the search string. This will allow users to search the site more accurately and achieve better result sets.

Multiple bug fixes and minor enhancements. 4.6 will fix a number of open issues and improve compliance with new technologies like MySQL5.


Developer Features

Developers will see in 4.6 the results of a major coordinated effort to clean up the code and make it easier to handle, with an emphasis on making the system more efficient, more reliable, and capable of further development. Among the improvements planned:

Significant changes to the Mambot handler. It is now preferred that Mambots be classes with defined methods. Old type Mambots will still work but are deprecated. The parameters for the Mambot are passed to it as an additional parameter to avoid the overhead of having to look them up in the database. Further changes to the interface are planned so that parameters are more flexible objects, and defined in terms of methods, not properties.

Introduction of much greater flexibility in the login process through the use of new Mambot hooks. User authentication is now achieved as a Mambot hook with a default Mambo authentication Mambot provided at installation, but can be removed. All authentication Mambots must succeed, otherwise login fails. Additional Mambot hooks for optional login and logout time actions.

The responsibility for creating the pathway is shifted to components. Adding to the pathway is done by providing two parameters - a text label and a URL for the link. The older mechanism of adding HTML through $mainframe is still available for the moment.

A new mosDirectory class is introduced. The class includes methods for doing useful operations on file system directories.

A new mosFileManager class is introduced. The class will carry out file system operations, with further developments planned to deal with safe mode issues and the file system.

The new language handling mechanism based on gettext is introduced.

A completely new integrated installer. The new installer gives better diagnostics on XML defects. The chances of leaving a clean situation when an installation fails are greatly improved, and uninstall is more robust. Developers can now create packages including more than one plugin, and every XML file that is found at the top level of the zip package will be processed by the installer. There is a single installation mechanism, regardless of the plugin type.

Domit is removed from the standard Mambo installation.

The Magpie RSS handler is included. Magpie is an Open Source application which is mature, stable, extensible, and deals well with RSS newsfeeds.

The mamboCore class is introduced. mamboCore is a singleton class that can provide all the information about configuration values with greater security and control than the use of globals. Use of globals is deprecated.

NOTE Preliminary design work for Mambo 5 has commenced, and the core team welcome comments or discussions with 3PDs about the design of the new system.