aerdt

I have been using Mambo for a long time and created a lot of customized solutions for Mambo, but in recent months, I notice more and more that the quality of 3rd party Mambo components leave a lot to be desired. About 70% of all the components on Mamboforge are either outdated, not compatible with the current Mambo versions and/or simply of such poor quality that they don't enhance Mambo in any way. About 80% of all the components do not follow the Mambo developing guidelines and widly insert code to the database, play around with custom classes (which are mostly not derived from the standard Mambo classes), have incorrect XML formatting, create they're own little world inside Mambo and compromise the Mambo look and feel and many more annoyances. Plus I notice that just a minor upgrade (4.5.0 -> 4.5.1a) renders about 90% of all the 4.5.0 components useless and almost 100% of the top Mambo components that were extremely popular in 4.5.0.

What is it? The lack of a good developer documentation or did developers slowly give up on Mambo, because they expect to see their efforts crumble to dust with a new Mambo release?

Am I the only one, who feels frustrated?

Just an observation...

thethepapapa

I hacked together a script for 3.14 way back when. About 6 to 8 months later, a new version of Mambo came out, and I had to think about recoding my contribution to make it work with the new version. As I was thinking and doing some work, Mambo changed again. All my thought was wasted and I had to start all over again.

Then Mambo changed again, and again, and I just quit thinking about making any changes until Mambo settled into a stable place.

Three years later..................

So, I haven't done anything. I don't have alot of time to sit around engaged in mental mastrabation while the project keeps marching on. So I'm not a whiz bang coder and can keep up with the pack.

I suspect a lot of devs couldn' spare the time to keep redeveloping to keep up with the 'jones' or whoever as well. Its hard enough keeping up without the band running ahead on you all the time.

This is why I think a lot of things fell by the wayside. With the current break, who knows, maybe some folks will start up again.

I'm waiting for a bit more before I get my float entered in the parade again.

My two Euro worth

thethe papapa

Mokegit

Just began developping in Mamo a couple of months ago. Since then, I noticed that the integration of Mambo with OSCommerce stopped, never was able to install phpBB as a component, have to translate simpleboard in french (500 lines - can't understand noone has gone thru it before - does it mean not so many people are using it ?), struggle to find a good/stable template to start developping from, many modules/components fail to install properly, could never get a photo gallery to work flawlessly. Result: I use Coppermine and phpBB in wrapper mode.

I like the look & feel of Mambo but NPDS or postnuke seem to be a lot more stable and have a large community producing more material.

Anyhow, let's not be discouraged - community has done a very good job so far. Stability is not always a good thing since it tends to prevent innovation. it's a question of managing the product life cycle carefully - I hope the current instability is a sign that we are ahead of a major improvement or we'll loose ground against others.

PLEASE IMPROVE QUALITY OF DOCUMENTATION !!!

manolo

Although im not a developer, im actually learning my first PHP code .... (at the age of 30 ) Your concerns are already noted, read this article;

stability and maturity article at mamboserver.com

Further more, i need to say that this is open source, which you already know! But my point is, getting it for nothing without any faults/bugs is not to be expected. Also getting it compatible with next versions is in my opinion a luxury...
Second, and its kind of a wish, i hope in the future some component builders will be actually working more together. For example; community builder, simpleboard and mypmspro are in some way integrating or facilitating eachother by making them compatible.
If this will be done at a bigger/larger scale, more knowledge and abillities will join together, with lesser loss of time and expences. Also when getting such components combined it will be a HUGE LEAP for Mambo, as its lacking this kind of elements and so in some ways not the first choice in CMS world...

Mano... i must and can be wrong...
signing off.. im a big NEWBIE