Discuss "Mambo Goes PHP 5" here.

[Elpie]

Discuss this announcement (http://mambo-news.org/content/view/192/34/) here.

[beat]

Sound, professional, decision !

Also for choosing php 5.2 and mysql 4.1 as minimum
Also keeping the backwards-compatible API is great.

[Elpie]

Thanks for your feedback Beat - much appreciated.

[ravenswood]

Hi,

good call.. is the plan still to go with Cake for future versions of mambo?

Cheers

John

[Elpie]

Originally Posted by ravenswood

.. is the plan still to go with Cake for future versions of mambo?

Absolutely
We are finalising some plans with this and more will be posted soon.

[cmscritic]

Hi there Elpie, my name is Mike and I'm the webmaster of CMS Critic.

I think you decision is a sound one, in order to keep Mambo in check with the times, you need to maintain current code developed in reasonably current technologies. When can we expect to see a product fully developed in version 5? do you have a timeline in mind?

[Elpie]

Hi Mike, as always with volunteer FOSS development, "its ready when its ready".

We are in a kind of interesting situation with Mambo at the moment - last year the team announced its plans for Mambo 4.7, which centred around making the frontend of Mambo accessible, and an announcement was made that Mambo 5 would be developed on cakePHP. Both statements are still valid but as it transpired, both were premature.

Mambo 4.7 would have been better off being called Mambo 5, since this has become a major release, bringing in new features and vastly improving both performance and functionality. And while the decision to rewrite Mambo using cakePHP as the framework was exactly the right decision for us, prototyping was started without the team ever doing any planning.

Following the departure of our former project leader the team realised that everyone had different ideas about what we each expected from Mambo 5. Using the "baking" analogy, some developers thought that Mambo would be a CMS layered on top of cakePHP (the icing on the cake) and wanted to simply refactor existing code to work on cakePHP. Other developers saw it as an opportunity to utilise cakePHP to build a killer CMS based on what we know our users want and need, but which is not necessarily available to them now. Thus, it became clear that we needed to start with a blank slate and carefully plan for a new (but familiar) CMS that will serve Mambo users well for many years to come while being extensible enough that we can respond to changes in technology without running the risk of finding ourselves in the situation we are now in with our development starting to be limited by the architecture that has served us well, but is just not good enough to take us where we need to go.

So, short answer - Mambo 5 is some way off. We are not hurrying the coding along because unless we plan properly we will hit problems in a few years. But, Mambo 4.7 should not be viewed as a simple point release that is just adding some new features to the code base - it is far more significant than that.

[cmscritic]

Hm, very interesting . Thank you for the prompt reply Elpie, it's interesting to get some history behind the decision.

Cheers,
Mike

[Sas]

Hi Elpie,

Great what everyone involved is doing for Mambo.

As zero-knowledge about CMS but experienced enough to know that some up-grades reaked havoc with my website for a while and many hours were spent solving problems, that in many cases you were so wonderful helping, I have a question:

Even if my service provider supports 100% PHP5 or 5.2, how challenging is it going to be to migrate to Mambo 4.7 or 5, since templates are going to be tabelless and many other features are going to change?

That would perhaps be good to know before hand.

Thank you for your excellent work!

Happy New Year!

Sergio

[Elpie]

Happy New Year Sergio

The upgrade from earlier versions to 4.7 will be a normal upgrade, just the same as any upgrade patch. The only noticeable difference is that patches within the 4.6 branch simply update and overwrite some files whereas the upgrade to 4.7 will replace most of the files.

The new frontend template that will come with Mambo is highly configurable and optimised for both accessibility and SEO and I understand a step-by-step tutorial will also be coming with it to make it easy for people to customise.

Existing templates should only require a few tweaks and 4.7 will be released with these fully documented. There won't be any need for existing templates to be replaced.

The 4.7 upgrade will be as painless as possible and is expected to be quick and easy.