Mambo Drops Another Pup: MiaCMS

The Mambo project has just undergone another fork -- with the core developers deciding to step away from the Mambo Foundation and start an independent project.

The new open source CMS project is called MiaCMS and is based on the recent Mambo 4.6.3 codeset. The project team is an all star list from recent Mambo history: Chad Auld, who was the Mambo Dev Team leader for nearly 3 years; Ozgur Cem Sen, who lead the team after Chad's departure about 6 months ago; Richard Ong, who has worked on Mambo docs and development for years; and finally Al Warren, who was with the Mambo project on and off for years and just recently lead the Mambo dev efforts. All-in-all, MiaCMS is comprised of the core of the Mambo Dev Team for the last 3 years.

A brief launch announcement can be found on the MiaCMS home page, but for more details, check out Chad's site, OpenSourcePenguin.

The new system appears to be moving the Mambo code toward a more portable and flexible place. Only time will tell, but the enhancements made to the codeset for the MiaCMS launch already show that this group will be more dedicated to innovation than the recent Mambo efforts.

While having good code is the whole point of an open source project, having a community behind the project is what gives it relevance. Activity on project forums is one indicator of whether a project has engaged a community behind their efforts. Though MiaCMS has only been out in the wild a week or so their forum already shows signs of life and a good spirit. Let's hope that the project's efforts across time live up to the potential it shows today.

As for Mambo, what will the future bring? The forums over at Mambo have been rather heated lately and it appears that there are some tensions brewing -- and no small measure of exasperation. This new fork of the project echoes the departure of the entire team a number of years ago -- that fork lead to the popular Joomla! CMS. It makes you wonder if Mambo will be remembered not for it's own significant achievements, but simply for the children that it spawned...