[week 50] Is Mambo loosing the feature battle?

[kyama]

I don’t post much here, as you can probably see. But as someone said once "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

This thread is nothing more then divisive, pure and simple. You do mostly good work with your fan sites, and then, imo, you shoot yourself in the foot with threads like this one.

There are many ways one can say the same thing. With positive and supportive tones and inflections, or with negative and undermining tones and inflections.

I have worked all over the world with people who’s second language is English, and none of them had much trouble relying there sentiments as you do.

Words like War, Battle, Split, Loosing don’t sound like words of support to me, nor do phases like “are still missed badly”, “How far are we behind already?” and “Was it wise to split up”.

Business school 101, if your people can’t get on board with your goals and ideas, replace them.

The customer is always right and votes with their feet. If a product of service doesn’t do what they want, they will go somewhere else. Maybe it’s your time to vote with your feet.

[cbh]

I installed texpattern and typo3 recently to see what they were all about. Back to Mambo pretty quickly - easy to install, easy to use, easy to explain to clients and users. Don't need all the geeky stuff that comes with the others. Leonardo da Vinci had a way of restating the prinicple of Occam's Razor (check it out on Wikipedia) - "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

Cheers
Chris

[fireater]

Ooh.. wait a second!
We all agree Mambo is a Great CMS.. Our mere presence on this forum proves that we are fans of Mambo and use it to build our sites.

This fact needs no shouting.

What we need the most is self-critisism and the power to see our favorite Mambo in comparision with all other CMS.

How else can Mambo improve if we are 100% satisfied with it already?

If you are totally satisfied with mambo as it is right now, then why work on v.5? why not just add features and make this 4.5 still better.

The fact is that any CMS needs to keep moving, improving and adding features.

Mambo does has some drawbacks like granular permissions system and so on. Mambo is stuck somewhere between a community portal script like phpnuke or its forks and a content management system like typo3 (this point is debatable i know, but we do need much more powerful document/article/content management in Mambo with versions and so on)

The starting tone of this thread does not do much justice to the spirit of Mambo, but yet, we do need (maybe another) thread to discuss mambo entirely in a critical way.

So, a thead for the hard thinking critics of Mambo would benefit us all much more than just praises for Mambo as it is now.

my 2 paisa.

[absalom]

Actually, from where I stand, an ACL with content fluidity (i.e. let a certain level of user edit only a certain area of content) and standards compliance (completely tableless backend and frontend) are the two major outstanding issues, followed closely by multilanguage support. I generally recieve an email a week wondering why Mambo isn't fully tableless yet, even though X-Mambo was released during the 4.5.0.x era.

Mambo is a good CMS and the dev team do work hard on providing a solid product.

Any other suggestions as to what "features" Mambo is missing is creeping featuritis. Deal with the standards, access levels and multilanguage first, and everything hopefully should fall into place.

[MasterChief]

Originally Posted by fireater

...we do need (maybe another) thread to discuss mambo entirely in a critical way. So, a thead for the hard thinking critics of Mambo would benefit us all much more than just praises for Mambo as it is now.

You are more than welcome to put your 2 paisa's here: http://forum.mamboserver.com/forumdisplay.php?f=49

[jobiwan]

Originally Posted by absalom

Any other suggestions as to what "features" Mambo is missing is creeping featuritis. Deal with the standards, access levels and multilanguage first, and everything hopefully should fall into place.

Totally agree with this.

After developing with PHPNuke, then Xaraya and finally XOOPS v2 finding Mambo was a real revelation!

What Mambo does well - it does VERY WELL....what it doesn't do well - it doesn't do...and that makes it great.

Stick to the core and keep it as USER FRIENDLY for the END USER/CLIENT (dumb **** as they often are) and we have a CMS that any cretin can love...go the way of TYPO3 and watch you precious clients hold there heads in dispair and terror at getting to grips with such a beast.

But ...it does need better rights/groups and language setup...evrything else is just up to us to code great components, modules and of course MAMBOTS

[prj]

Mambo wins for me!

As far as I'm concerned the next missing feature is being able to add user groups/permisions but at least one component comes close to sorting that, (shame its only menu based rather than content too though!).

[stingrey]

I guess for a really informed discussion, I guess we should explain what will be in 5.0, the new roadmap will be up soon, but some people may not be able to appreciate the way things are displayed in freemind

==========================================

So before this thread becomes another wishlist thread (and there's nothing wrong with wishlist threads, i always check them out).

Here are the major things we are aiming to include in 5.0 (main word is aiming):

-More powerful ACL
     - More Granular ACL privilges
     - ACL based on Role Based system
     - Ability to create your own ACL groups
-New Folder based content system
     - Unlimted folder nesting
     - Ability to link content to more than one folder
-Cleaner xhtml code output
     - Output controlled by patTemplates
     - Ability to 'skin' component/content output
     - Proper separation of business layer and presentation layer (MVC)
     - Standards compliant output
-Multilanguage Support
-Database abstraction
     - Use of ADODB to allow use of any other sql DB
     - XML data exporting
-Better Media/File Management

For developers who keep track of the CVS, they will have now doubt seen much of the groundwork for these things already in place and taking shape.

==========================================

Why are we including this all in one release?
Simple, this is a MAJOR upgrade of the whole mambo architecture and will result in an overhaul of much of mambo.
This is also the reason why the maintenance team was created as people may not want to upgrade from 4.5.x to 5.0.

There's only two ways of doing this, either one big major release after a long period of development or smaller continual upgrades over short periods. Community response seems to indicate that the continual upgrade process is not working for various reasons people have highlighted in various posts. Hence the shift to the one major release method.

==========================================

Just remember, while its is easy enough to posts feature requests/wishlists, actually implementing them is a far more difficult undertaking. We have to be mindful of:
- upgradability,
- 3PD support/documentation/understanding,
- giving people all these functions while trying to keep simplicity as the foremost consideration (hiding the magic),
- usability and UI considirations


Its all a very fine balancing act to try and achieve:
Power and Simplicity

==========================================

Lastly we are not in a competition with other products out there. Often inspiration is garnered from other projects. And as developers would know, we utilise a myriad of other OS projects to power mambo (DOMIT, phpGACL, etc).

What were striving to do is for Mambo to reach its potential and achieve the vision that we have for it.
It may not necessarily the best way, not necessarily the most efficient way, not necessarily the most powerful way, not necessarily the simplest way, its certainly not the only way, their is really no 'right way', were merely attempting to do it the Mambo way.
And we feel confident the Mambo way meets the needs of a whole host of people out there.

[stingrey]

Originally Posted by eyezberg

[maybe OT]
There is one thing I wonder about:
If Mambo 451 is stable, and no features get added, what will the Maintenance Team work on..? Fixing bugs, security holes etc.. there haven't been many since 451a I think?
I'd have thought a good (almost said better..) investment of workpower and knowledge would have been to get a good, complete, functional Documentation out! That's the one thing which always comes last, but is most needed.
Admin docs, 1st use/setup docs, customization docs, writing CMTs... A solid document on which to build for v5.
Example: http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=24197
Just look at the post count of mamboserver>operating mambo>admin & install: 20 500 posts!! (out of 24 000..)

Id agree there are no major bugs in 4.5.1A, but there are a lot of more minor annoying bugs that can make daily administration of Mambo a pain. There are at least 100 (some maybe be duplicates) bugs in the tracker that need to be fixed. These are the things the MT will be focusing on. To mke 4.5.1 truly stable.


Documentation is a completely seperate area and is handled by the Documentation Team superbly led by Michelle Bisson. The Development Team are coders, not documentation writers. you dont want coders writing how to manuals or tutorials, especially those most familiar with the product. The Development Team helps the Documentation Team in certain areas from time to tim, but to have programmers write proper readable and understabable documentation for novice users is a misallocation of resources.

And is we continually point out, everyone wants documentation written, but not many actually vounteer to help out. Documentation doesnt get written by itself, we need the help of the community and this is one way non-coders can directly contribute to the success and use of mambo.

[eyezberg]

Id agree there are no major bugs in 4.5.1A, but there are a lot of more minor annoying bugs that can make daily administration of Mambo a pain. There are at 100 (some maybe be duplicates) bugs in the tracker that need to be fixed. These are the things the MT will be focusing on. To mke 4.5.1 truly stable.

thanks for clarifying what there is left to do for a stable 451.

And is we continually point out, everyone wants documentation written, but no many actually vounteer to help out.

I'd volunteer, but have no idea where to start (now threads have been posted, thx Michelle), no intention of looking for which documents are needed (yes, I am lazy!).
There should be (is there?) a list of people you can sign up for, state your preferences (like: general/components/modules/templates/frontend/backend/...) and then Michelle just sends out tasks to all involved, or someone else from the doc team does. I don't want to submit doc. projects, I want to be told what's needed.
It should really be centralized so one or two (how many are there on the doc team?) have and keep a full overview at all times about what is completed/what remains to be done/what should be next etc..
I just had a look at that "Wiki Wacko" thing on http://docs.mamboserver.com/HomePage, it looks like I have to read documentation on this .. thing.. to be able to help out writing documentation!? Sounds counter-productive to me, sorry. If you want help, make it easy on us. Lower the geek factor a bit. Thanks
As of lately, I've become a bit more involved in the french community, translated a few components and/or lang files, which I will keep on doing.

stingrey, thanks really a lot for the list of

the major things we are aiming to include in 5

!
I don't know if you dev/core team guys (and gals) realise, but for the average user, it is not easy to find information, spread out on a few sites, in weird formats (I've NEVER used CVS and don't plan to anytime soon, so no idea what has been coded already (or tested), many people I'm sure don't know what a wiki is/how to use it, same for the doc/roadmap output etc..), so this is indeed helpfull. And it adresses finally the "Mambo most wanted" features.

The thing is, that's the roadmap for v5.
Is there also a more general "objective" idea floating around or written down as to what Mambo is to be in the future (power in simplicity, yes I know...), if it's aiming to be more of a community portal, a business interface, a.. dunno, no need to limit this to any particular drawer, just a general idea about where this is heading in the long run..?

Originally Posted by YTW

In fact I would apreciate to see the official mission statement of the Mambo CMS product. I am thinking as if this product should tend to be used for masses, but it might be a technical goodie for a niche of experts too. 100.000+ downloads does not fit anymore with a niche positioning i guess. Anyway, this should be stated somewhere [Nov 21st 2004, http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthr...&page=5&pp=10]

Next suggestion: could we (users) get some sort of "family tree" of the Mambo team (who does what etc..), a bit like the profiles on "Meet the team" here: http://mamboserver.com/cat/Meet_the_team/ where we get a look at some pics of 8 or so of you, what about the rest (doc team, MT, close Component Devs, advisors whatever..?)

And to finish, a question: as the "Wishlist" is gone now from the official forums, guess you're prepared to have "General" swamped with wishes, right..?
Ok, edit, just found it.. I had "Technical Zone" collapsed for ages, so that's where it's hiding now.. forget this remark then..

Or, let me just add some thoughts:
I've come to Mambo from Flash, wanting to quickly create an easy to manage site about the software and related infos. Works fine.
Now Flash, we get a new version about once a year, year 1/2, and from time to time, bug-fix updaters. Any version opens files (.fla) created with previous versions. The dev team has a "submit feature request" form, is present on most well-known forums, has their own, checks out the 200 or so Flash blogs, has a large team of beta testers, and most added stuff you'll find in any new release is based on customer feedback and request, and increased stability and speed/performance. It's one of the most succesfull software packs for webdesign today. Ok, it's not free, so what does that change?

Edit 1 (maybe more later) as I'm currently reading the "User Interface & ergonomy" thread:
Flash MX used to have a beginner/advanced mode switch for the code editor, this was taken out in MX 2004, and may be integrated again into next version due to huge demand from non-coders (ie, designers).
That could be a nice idea for Mambo Admin: 2 simple buttons: Simple/Advanced modes, with basic tasks, wizards, more tut's etc.. in Simple; and the ususal admin for Advanced..?!
Edit 2: Ok, I see, I need to finish reading the thread before posting more; John (like most of the time) thinks along the same lines:

Originally Posted by Mambosolutions

Imagine when you first install mambo, and at the end of the setup, it ask you to choose which type of admin layout you wish to have: Expert / Easy or Coder/ Editor etc... then of course you could switch later.

Thanks for your time, readers.

2 more €-cents, will make a $ soon...